Rex Krueger
Published 15 Mar 2023Can an old tool teach us a few new tricks?
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March 16, 2023
Wooden marking gauges are NOT what you think
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Field Marshal Slim’s one and only demotion … from lance-corporal back down to private
William Slim, arguably the best British general of the Second World War, didn’t have the fastest start to his military career, as recounted in an article by Frank Owen, the editor of the WW2 South East Asia theatre publication Phoenix. This and many others appear in Dr. Robert Lyman’s upcoming book Slim, Master of War:
The General stood on an ammunition box. Facing him in a green amphitheatre of the low hills that ring the Palel Plain, sat or squatted the British officers and sergeants of the 11th East African Division. They were then new to the Burma Front and were moving into the line the next day. The General removed his battered slouch hat, which the Gurkhas wear and which has become the headgear of the 14th Army. “Take a good look at my mug”, he advised. “Not that I consider it to be an oil painting. But I am the Army Commander and you had better be able to recognize me — if only to say “Look out, the old b…. is coming round”.
Lieutenant-General Sir William Slim, KCB, CB, DSO, MC (“Bill”) is 53, burly, grey and going a bit bald. His mug is large and weather beaten, with a broad nose, jutting jaw, and twinkling hazel eyes. He looks like a well-to-do West Country farmer, and could be one. For he has energy and patience and, above all, the man has common sense. However, so far Slim has not farmed. He started life as a junior clerk, once he was a school teacher, and then he became the foreman of a testing gang in a Midland engineering works. For the next 30 years Slim was a soldier.
He began at the bottom of the ladder as a Territorial private. August 4, 1914, found him at Summer camp with his regiment. The Territorials were at once embodied in the Regular Army, and Slim got his first stripe as lance-corporal. A few weeks later he was a private again, the only demotion that this Lieutenant-General has suffered.
It was a sweltering, dusty day and the regiment plodded on its twenty-mile route march down an endless Yorkshire lane. At that time British troops still marched in fours, so that Lance-Corporal Slim, as he swung along by the side of his men, made the fifth in the file, which brought him very close to the roadside. There were cottages there and an old lady stood at the garden gate.
“I can see her yet”, Slim reminisces. “she was a beautiful old lady with her hair neatly parted in the middle and wearing a black print dress. In her hand she held a beautiful jug, and on the top of that jug was a beautiful foam, indicating that it contained beer. She was offering it to the soldier boys.”
The Lance-Corporal took one pace to the side and grasped the jug. As he did, the column was halted with a roar. The Colonel, who rode a horse at its head, had glanced back. Slim was hailed before him and “busted” on the spot. The Colonel bellowed “Had we been in France you would have been shot.” Slim confides, “I thought he was a damned old fool – and he was. I lost my stripe, but he lost his army.” In truth he did, in France in March 1918. Bill soon got his stripe back.
Now in this corner of Palel Plain, one of India’s bloodiest battlefields and the scene of one of his greatest victories, Slim tells the officers and men of the 11th Division, “I have commanded every kind of formation from a section upwards to this army, which happens to be the largest single one in the world.” (At that time, Slim had under his command half a million troops.) “I tell you this simply that you shall realize I know what I am talking about. I understand the British soldier because I have been one, and I have learned about the Japanese soldier because I have been beaten by him. I have been kicked by this enemy in the place where it hurts, and all the way from Rangoon to India where I had to dust-off my pants. Now, gentlemen, we are kicking our Japanese neighbours back to Rangoon.”
Slim commanded the rear guard of the army that retreated from Burma in 1942. He is proud of that. His men marched and fought for a hundred days and nights and across a thousand miles. But this retreat was no Dunkirk. Says Slim “We brought our weapons out with us, and we carried our wounded, too. Dog-tired soldiers, hardly able to put one foot in front of another, would stagger along for hours carrying or holding up a wounded comrade. When at last they reached India over those terrible jungle mountains they did not go back to an island fortress and to their own people where they could rest and refit. The Army of Burma sank down on the frontier of India, dead beat and in rags. But, they fought here all through the downpour of the monsoon, and they saved India until a great new Army – which is this one – could be built up to take the offensive once again. In those days, if anyone had gone to me with a single piece of good news I would have burst out crying. Nobody ever did.”
He tells another story. One day he entered a jungle glade in a tank. In front of him stood a group of soldiers, in their midst the eternal Tommy. Assuming an optimism which he did not feel, Slim jumped out of the tank and approached them. “Gentlemen!” he said (which is the nice way that British generals sometimes address their troops) “Things might be worse!”
“‘Ow could they be worse?” inquired the Tommy.
“Well, it could rain” said Slim, lightly. He adds “And within quarter of an hour it did.”
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History of the Royal Navy – Wooden Walls (1600-1805)
Ryan Doyle
Published 3 Mar 2013
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QotD: “In the tattoo parlour, the customer is always wrong”
There’s only one thing worse than slavery, of course, and that’s freedom. I don’t mean, I hasten to add, my own freedom, to which I am really rather attached; no, it is other people’s freedom, and what they choose to do with it, that appalls me. They have such bad taste. The notion of self-expression has much to answer for. It gives people the presumptuous notion that somewhere deep inside them there is a genius trying to get out. This genius, at least round here, expresses itself mainly by drinking too much, taking drugs, tattooing its skin and piercing its body. On the whole, I think, the self is best not expressed and, like children, should be neither seen nor heard.
One day, I arrived on the ward to discover an enthusiastic self-expresser in the first bed. Her two-inch-long nails were painted lime green, and looked as if they gave off the kind of radiation that meant instant leukaemia. That, however, was the least of it.
She was lying in the bed, décolleté, to reveal breasts pierced with many metal bars ending in steel balls to keep them in place, and for what is known round here as decoration. I couldn’t look at them without wincing; ex-President Clinton would no doubt have felt her pain. As for her face, it was the modern equivalent of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian. It was also the refutation of the doctrine that the customer is always the right. In the tattoo parlour, the customer is always wrong.
She had a ring through the septum of her nose, and a ring through her upper lip, so that the two clacked when she spoke. She had a stud in her tongue, and two studs through her lower lip. She had so many rings through her ears that they looked like solenoids. She had a metal bar through the bridge of her nose and rings at the outer edges of her eyebrows. If she were to die, she could probably be sold to a scrap metal merchant.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Lady of the Rings”, Asian Age, 2005-12-27.
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March 15, 2023
Not only is the science “settled” … it’s already in the school textbooks
David Friedman on his attempts to follow up on claims made in a textbook on climate change already in use in US public schools:
Introduction to Modern Climate Change by Andrew Dessler is an elementary climate science textbook, now in its third edition. In Chapter 9, “Impacts of Climate Change”, it has:
Scientists predict that sea level will rise 47 to 73 cm (19 to 29 inches) above 1995–2014 levels by 2100. This may not sound like a significant challenge, but it is much larger than the 18 cm of sea level experienced over the twentieth century, which is already challenging for many who live near sea level. Like temperature, these predictions of sea-level rise might sound small but, also like temperature, they are not. In Florida, for example, a sea-level rise in the middle of the projected range would inundate 9 percent of Florida’s current land area at high tide. This includes virtually all of the Florida Keys as well as 70 percent of Miami-Dade County. Almost one-tenth of Florida’s current population, or nearly 2 million people, live in this vulnerable zone, and it includes residential real estate valued at hundreds of billions of dollars. It also includes important infrastructure, such as two nuclear reactors, three prisons, and 68 hospitals.
That struck me as implausible, given what else I had seen on the effect of sea level rise. The footnote for the claim was to Stanton and Ackerman (2007), which turned out to be not a peer reviewed journal article but a report commissioned by the Environmental Defense fund, an environmentalist group. It includes the same claims, but for 27 inches of sea-level rise not the 24 inches that is Dessler’s “middle of the projected range”. It refers the reader to Appendix C for “detailed sources and methodology”. Going there, I found:
To estimate the impact of sea-level rise on land area, populations, and public and private assets and infrastructure, we began with a 1:250,000 Digital Elevation Model (DEM) map of the State of Florida, and divided the state into “vulnerable” and “not vulnerable” zones demarcated by 1.5 meters of elevation and other factors described by Titus and Richman (2000) as corresponding to 27 inches of sea-level rise.
So what they are showing as the vulnerable area is not the 27 inch or 24 inch contour but the 1.5 meter (5 feet) contour. The explanation, from Titus, J.G. and C. Richman (2001). “Maps of lands vulnerable to sea level rise: modeled elevations along the US Atlantic and Gulf coasts“. Climate Research 18: 205–228, a journal article written by two EPA people and presumably peer reviewed:
Thus, at a typical site, the 1.5-meter contour would be flooded by spring high tides (i.e., high tides during new and full moons) when sea level rises 80 cm
Figure 1 below (Titus and Richman Figure 4) is a map of Florida with the region within the 1.5 meter contour colored red, the region between 1.5 and 3.5 blue. Dessler’s middle of the projected range is 60 cm. Stanton and Ackerman’s 27 inches is 68.6 cm. The map shows what its authors claim would be flooded at 80cm.
Figure 2 below is a population density map of Florida from Wikipedia to which I have added the 1.5m contours from Figure 1. The large flooded area on the southern tip of Florida includes none of the densely populated area around Miami; only one of the tiny areas farther north appears to be in part on a populated area. That is not surprising — areas very close to sea level are likely to be marsh, in this case the everglades, and poor places to build on.
Stanton and Ackerman claim that their own calculations, using data bases of elevation and population, produce a total population in the at-risk area of 1.5 million. That was the figure Dessler gave in his first edition, presumably increased to almost 2 million in the third edition to reflect the increase in Florida’s population. Figure 2 shows why I don’t believe it. The flooded areas are in places almost all of which have very low population density, making it hard to see how flooding nine percent of the land area, most of it in the everglades, can flood almost ten percent of the population. Even if all of the Florida Keys are flooded, their total population is only about 80,000.
That problem is in addition to the fact that Dessler’s claim is for 60 cm of sea level rise, Stanton and Ackerman’s, from which Dessler got his figure for how many people are flooded, is for 68.6 cm (27 inches), and Titus and Richman get the 1.5 m contour that Stanton and Ackerman say they are using by assuming 80cm of sea level rise. Further reasons for suspicion are that Stanton and Ackerman gave figures for sea level rise substantially higher than either the IPCC figure at the time or the current IPCC figure, which suggests that they were trying to make the consequences of climate change look as scary as possible, and that they write “1.5 meters of elevation and other factors described by Titus and Richman (2000) as corresponding to 27 inches of sea-level rise” when Titus and Richman actually describe 1.5 meters as corresponding to 80 cm (31.5 inches) of sea level rise.
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Irish Soda Bread from 1836
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 14 Mar 2023
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Mining the moon would be “harmful” to indigenous people, say activists
Among the many, many things that are said to be harmful to indigenous culture we’re now told to include any kind of Lunar exploitation as modern colonialism:
Artist’s conception of Helium-3 mining on the surface of the Moon.
Image from Inhabitat.com
Humans have boldly ventured beyond the Earth into space for more than half a century now. It’s a testament to the ambition of the modern world.
And today, humanity is still more ambitious. A new space race is underway between the US and China to mine the Moon for rare metals. NASA is even hoping to establish a long-term presence on the Moon and eventually send humans to Mars.
But it seems that some scientists-cum-activists, in hock to identity politics, want to rein in that ambition. Speaking ahead of a US conference on the ethics of space exploration, held by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) last week, astrobiologist Dr Pamela Conrad told the Guardian that space exploration, particularly efforts to mine the Moon, is in danger of becoming an exercise in “colonialism” and “exploitation”. Conrad warned that “if something that’s not here [on Earth] is seen as a resource, just ripe to be exploited, then that [perpetuates] colonialism”.
Conrad’s fellow panellist at the conference, Dr Hilding Neilson, went even further. According to Neilson, a member of the Native American Mi’kmaq people, indigenous people have a deep connection with celestial bodies like the Moon. They therefore have a more profound and, by implication, superior “way of knowing” the Moon compared with those advocating space exploration. The latter merely see the Moon “as a dead object to be conquered”, Neilson says – meaning that those advocating space exploration are “essentially cheering on the history of colonialism”.
There are so many problems with this argument it’s difficult to know where to start. Both Conrad and Neilson appear to be using the specific and brutal practice of “colonialism” to describe – and demonise – humanity’s attempt to master nature in general. That’s a flawed enough approach to take to the history of our growing mastery of nature on Earth. But it’s even more flawed in the context of space.
After all, there’s one big difference between laying claim to the resources of other countries under colonialism and attempting to mine the Moon – nobody lives on the Moon! So no one would be “exploited” or “colonised” if humans were to mine it. Space exploration is therefore not the same as colonialism.
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An Aircraft Carrier Without A Deck? | The Remarkable Brodie Landing System
Rex’s Hangar
Published 21 Sept 2022Today we’re taking a look at the remarkable Brodie Launch System. This device could be used on land or aboard ships, and it was designed to provide accessibility for light aircraft in extremely remote locations during WW2.
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QotD: The coming generation isn’t the Millennials … it’s Gen X
That’s your next layer of political and social control. The youngest of us are in their late 30s (again, using the broadest definition); most of us are well into middle age, and some of us are plunging headfirst into late middle age. The chiefs of police, the military’s senior staff officers (including, by now, some general and flag officers), the CEOs and CFOs … they’re not Millennials, they’re Xers.
Admittedly we’re a forgettable bunch. We didn’t get a chance at natural, healthy teenage rebellion, because our parents, the goddamn Boomers, claimed a monopoly on rebellion, so we had to be all, you know, like, whatever about it. The Boomers thought Andy Warhol was a serious artist and Bob Dylan a talented musician; is it any wonder that Kurt Cobain’s godawful caterwauling was the best we could do?
All of that is water under the bridge, of course. But here’s where it gets really, really meta: This great social upheaval is, for us, a copy of a copy. It’s people who were actually alive in the 1960s cosplaying The Sixties™ — just like they did the entire time we were growing up. Just as we had no template for teenage rebellion, we don’t really have a template for riots and whatnot either. Some of us have decided to crank it up to eleven — all of the most obnoxious Karens are Gen Xers — but lots of us … haven’t. I really have no idea just what the majority of my generational cohort is doing right now while our most vocal idiots are out Karening, in much the same way I have no idea what the majority of Silents were doing while the Chicago Seven were out doing their thing.
All I know is, there’s an entire layer of political power between AOC and Pelosi. We haven’t really seen it up until now, but it’s there. Is Gen X finally, at long last, going to get its shit together? I suspect that the real drama is still waiting in the wings.
Severian, “Talkin’ ’bout My Generation!”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-06-11.
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March 14, 2023
“Strangely, my friends have a more negative view of the feminist movement than I do”
Bryan Caplan explains why he chooses to write the books he writes:
Almost by definition, writing controversial books tends to provoke negative emotional reactions. Anger above all. Anger which, in turn, inspires fear. And not without just cause; the sad story of Salman Rushdie sends shivers down the spine of almost any writer. If you write controversial books — or care about someone who does — you should be at least a little afraid of the anger your writing inspires.
[…]
In contrast, when I announced the imminent publication of Don’t Be a Feminist, the fear went through the roof. Several folks warned me of “career suicide”. Others told me that I had no idea what horrors awaited me. Friends staged mini-interventions on my behalf.
The underlying premise, naturally, was that the feminist movement is at once terribly powerful and horribly bad-tempered.
My best guess is that the warnings are overblown. Strangely, my friends have a more negative view of the feminist movement than I do. Whether my guess is right or wrong, though, all this intense, widespread fear really ought to trouble the feminist conscience.
If I said, “Hi” to one of my kids’ friends, and they responded by fleeing in terror, my reaction would be, “Did I do something to scare him?” I would ask my kids, “Why was he so afraid of me?” If such incidents started to repeat, I would be severely troubled. “I thought I came off as a friendly dad, but I guess I’m seen as an ogre.”
The same applies if I were a feminist, and I discovered that critics are literally afraid to criticize feminism. If only a few critics feared feminism, my question would be, “What did we do to scare them?” If I discovered that fear of feminism was widespread, a full soul-search would be in order. “I thought we came off as a friendly movement, but I guess we’re seen as ogres.”
And guess what? Fear of feminism plainly is widespread.
What, then, are feminists doing wrong? Above all, cultivating and expressing vastly too much anger. Sharing your angry feelings is an effective way to dominate the social world, but a terrible way to discover the truth or sincerely convince others. Maybe you don’t mean to scare others; maybe you’re just acting impulsively. Yet either way, the fear feminists inspire is all too real.
Social media, selfies, and depression
In The Free Press, Jonathan Haidt notes the inflection point at which young liberal women started to become depressed at a much higher rate than the rest of the population — a trend that has continued for over a decade:
In September 2020, Zach Goldberg, who was then a graduate student at Georgia State University, discovered something interesting in a dataset made public by Pew Research. Pew surveyed about 12,000 people in March 2020, during the first month of the COVID shutdowns. The survey included this item: “Has a doctor or other healthcare provider EVER told you that you have a mental health condition?” Goldberg graphed the percentage of respondents who said “yes” to that item as a function of their self-placement on the liberal-conservative 5-point scale and found that white liberals were much more likely to say yes than white moderates and conservatives. (His analyses for non-white groups generally found small or inconsistent relationships with politics.)
I wrote to Goldberg and asked him to redo it for men and women separately, and for young vs. old separately. He did, and he found that the relationship to politics was much stronger for young (white) women. You can see Goldberg’s graph here, but I find it hard to interpret a three-way interaction using bar charts, so I downloaded the Pew dataset and created line graphs, which make it easier to interpret.
Here’s the same data, showing three main effects: gender (women higher), age (youngest groups higher), and politics (liberals higher). The graphs also show three two-way interactions (young women higher, liberal women higher, young liberals higher). And there’s an important three-way interaction: it is the young liberal women who are highest. They are so high that a majority of them said yes, they had been told that they have a mental health condition.
Data from Pew Research, American Trends Panel Wave 64. The survey was fielded March 19–24, 2020.
Graphed by Jon Haidt.In recent weeks — since the publication of the CDC’s report on the high and rising rates of depression and anxiety among teens — there has been a lot of attention to a different study that shows the gender-by-politics interaction — Gimbrone, Bates, Prins & Keyes (2022), titled: “The politics of depression: Diverging trends in internalizing symptoms among US adolescents by political beliefs”. Gimbrone et al. examined trends in the Monitoring the Future dataset, which is the only major U.S. survey of adolescents that asks high school students (seniors) to self-identify as liberal or conservative (using a 5-point scale). The survey asks four items about mood/depression. Gimbrone et al. found that prior to 2012 there were no sex differences and only a small difference between liberals and conservatives. But beginning in 2012, the liberal girls began to rise, and they rose the most. The other three groups followed suit, although none rose as much, in absolute terms, as did the liberal girls (who rose .73 points since 2010, on a 5-point scale where the standard deviation is .89).
Data from Monitoring the Future, graphed by Gimbrone et al. (2022). The scale runs from 1 (minimum) to 5 (maximum).
The authors of the study try to explain the fact that liberals rise first and most in terms of the terrible things that conservatives were doing during Obama’s second term, e.g.,
Liberal adolescents may have therefore experienced alienation within a growing conservative political climate such that their mental health suffered in comparison to that of their conservative peers whose hegemonic views were flourishing.
The progressive New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg took up the question and wrote a superb essay making the argument that teen mental health is not and must not become a partisan issue. She dismissed Gimbrone et al.’s explanation as having a poor fit with their own data:
Barack Obama was re-elected in 2012. In 2013, the Supreme Court extended gay marriage rights. It was hard to draw a direct link between that period’s political events and teenage depression, which in 2012 started an increase that has continued, unabated, until today.
After examining the evidence, including the fact that the same trends happened at the same time in Britain, Canada, and Australia, Goldberg concluded that “Technology, not politics, was what changed in all these countries around 2012. That was the year that Facebook bought Instagram and the word ‘selfie’ entered the popular lexicon.”
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Turkey has always been the awkward ally in NATO, but for how much longer?
In Strategika, Zafiris Rossidis examines the shift of Turkish sentiment away from its longstanding role in the NATO alliance and toward a more Russian-friendly and more independent stance in international affairs:
Turkish flag.
Photo by Burak Su via Wikimedia Commons.
A poll conducted in December 2022 by the Turkish company Gezici found that 72.8% of Turkish citizens polled were in favor of good relations with Russia. By comparison, nearly 90% perceive the United States as a hostile country. It also revealed that 24.2% of citizens believe that Russia is hostile, while 62.6% believe that Russia is a friendly country. Similarly, more than 60% of respondents said that Russia contributes positively to the Turkish economy.
Turkey began to distance itself from the United States as early as 2003, when it refused the passage of American troops to Iraq. In 2010, it destroyed the U.S.–Israel–Turkey triangle, breaking up with Israel. In 2011, Turkey implemented a policy in Syria that was hardly in line with U.S. interests. The final distancing took place in 2016, with the July coup, for which Turkey blamed the United States.
Turkey considers itself very important to the United States but declares that Ankara can live without Washington. This concept has become the point of departure for Turkey in its quest to reconstitute the Ottoman Empire. Minister of the Interior Süleyman Soylu declares that the Turkish government will design the new world order with the help of Allah, and Western powers will eat the dust behind almighty Turkey (December 8, 2022).
According to a RAND Corporation volume on Turkey, there are four scenarios for the future of Turkish strategic orientation: 1) Turkey will remain a difficult partner for the United States; 2) Turkey will become democratic and unite with the West; 3) Turkey will be between East and West, but have better relations with powers such as China, Iran, and Russia, than with the U.S. and the EU; and 4) Turkey will completely abandon the West.
From the evidence in the case of the Russian–Ukrainian war, Russia, China, Turkey, and Iran justify the Russian invasion since NATO and the EU have designs on their neighborhood. Above all, they are united by a common hatred for the West. They are frenemies and they know it: on the contrary, the U.S. tends to invest in frenemies as if they were true friends.
The U.S. observed the rapprochement of Turkey and Russia without renouncing the traditional alliance with Turkey, which today has no longer such importance. Turkey was useful when it was an “enemy” of the USSR and the U.S. made far too many concessions for the sake of this useful enmity. In short, there is some inertia in the modification of the principle “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, as of course “the friend of a friend is my friend”. Turkey’s role in NATO worries the U.S., as Ankara–Moscow relations have acquired some shared strategic characteristics.
?he attraction between the two countries lies in their equally authoritarian governance models and the fact that their strategic culture and operational codes bear similarities: Both countries are revisionist, aggressive, and assertive in their regions; both countries claim to be encircled, which they use as a pretext for their unilateral actions; and both countries have militarized their foreign policy, waging hybrid warfare, resorting to proxy warfare, and blackmailing countries that offer resistance. Russia and Turkey cooperate on natural gas and oil pipelines; Russia has sold weapons such as the S-400 missile system to Turkey; Russia has provided technical assistance in the construction of Turkey’s nuclear plants; the two nations have collaborated in Central Asia (i.e., Azerbaijan); they import and export each other’s commodities; and Turkey has illegally transported Russian fuel to China and Iran, thereby bypassing sanctions on Russia, to mention only a few.
But the big issue for U.S.–Turkey relations against the backdrop of the Russian–Ukrainian war has four strands: First, the issue of the important role Turkey plays in the grain export agreement, which if cancelled will create a food crisis in Africa. Second, Turkey’s blackmailing of the NATO candidacies of Sweden and Finland. Third, the Turkish application to purchase the F-16 and the possible conflict between Congress and the Biden administration over the administration’s request to grant Turkey the license to do so. Finally, Turkey’s non-adoption of NATO sanctions against Russia. The possibility of Erdoğan using a strategy of tensions with Greece (e.g., multiple violations of Greek airspace, aggressiveness in the Aegean, weaponization of immigration, threats of bombing Athens with the new “Tayfun” short-range ballistic missile) to rally the electorate around his party and detach it from any opposition — all recent polls have AKP trailing the opposition — prior to the June election is one explanation for Turkey’s behavior that is being considered by the U.S., which nonetheless is angered that Turkey is the only NATO country that has not adopted the sanctions against Russia.
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German Troop Trials “Push-Button” Gewehr 41(W)
Forgotten Weapons
Published 8 Nov 2022When the German army wanted a new semiauto service rifle in 1941, it received submissions from two companies; Walther and Mauser. Walther’s design didn’t strictly meet the criteria set forth, but it was clearly the better rifle and would eventually win the competition. This involved conducting troop trials, and Walther got an initial contract for 5,000 rifles for those trials. That first batch of rifles differed in several ways from the version that was ultimately put into mass production. Most substantially, the first version of the G41(W) had a push-button bolt release on the left side of the stock. After loading two stripper clips, one would push the button to close the bolt. Of course, one could also simply pull the bolt handle back slightly and release to do the same thing — and so the bolt release button was removed to simplify production. In addition, the bolt guide rail on the receiver would be lengthened on production, optics mounting rails were added (although never really used), and the serrations on the spring guide rod were dropped.
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QotD: Facebook’s entire structure is designed to prevent information “going viral”
You might think that social media is where to go to share this very cool thing, and watch it go viral. And, in fact, that happens on Twitter and a few other platforms. I’m not always right in forecasting which things I post will go viral, but a few times every year I will share something on Twitter that grabs people’s attention so much that it gets tens of thousands of retweets and likes. Millions of people might see it.
That’s what going viral is all about.
Now here’s the kicker. I put up that same item on my Facebook author’s page, and the company will actively work to prevent people from seeing it. And adding insult (a company specialty), they will send me an alert telling me: This post could go viral if you pay us money for promoting it.
At first glance, this just seems another way to maximize profits. And who can blame Mark Zuckerberg for wanting to get a few more dollars in his bank account? Let’s feel some pity for a guy who just lost $100 billion.
But the real devastating part of this story is that Facebook is actually preventing users from sharing the funniest joke in the world. Facebook actually hates seeing some videos go viral, even if they are the most amusing things on the web. Every day they work to prevent folks from seeing a mind-blowing photo — and many other things that can’t be monetized.
This can’t be good for the user experience. This can’t be what users want, or what they would tell the company in a focus group or via market research.
And it certainly can’t be good for business.
So I’m amused when I hear how Facebook is envious of TikTok, which has much superior user engagement. Well, duh. Of course TikTok has greater engagement — that’s because Facebook has put systems in place to prevent entertaining things from going viral. They are now scrambling to work around this tiny detail, but they won’t succeed.
I’ve reduced my Facebook posts by at least 70%, and this was the main reason. I can’t be the only person who has responded in this way.
It’s not in the company’s DNA to promote interesting things on its platform. That’s why I wasn’t surprised when Facebook’s recent attempt to imitate Substack collapsed in total failure. I knew that would happen on day one — because Facebook will never let writers go viral on the platform. Mr. Z. wants to get paid before anything goes viral, and that’s the exact opposite of Substack’s successful formula — which rewards the creator more than the platform.
When Facebook initially launched this touted publishing platform, somebody asked me what I thought about it. “Facebook has the power to give a writer access to millions of readers,” I replied, “but they will never let it happen. The entire internal structure of the company is designed to prevent this.”
The speed of the collapse, however, was surprising. Facebook announced the launch of Bulletin on June 29, 2021. Facebook announced the termination of Bulletin on October 4, 2022.
Even King Henry VIII’s wives lasted longer than that.
Ted Gioia, “How Web Platforms Collapse”, The Honest Broker, 2022-12-05.
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March 13, 2023
People in high places like “Pryam Farll”
Elizabeth Nickson on the kakistocratic “elites” of the west and the dangerous policies they’ve been pushing:
How our leaders are seen by the people, their prey.
Around early Trump, a character calling himself Pryam Farll acquired a host of “friends” on Facebook among the most influential intellectual activist/writers on the right. He claimed to be a member of the Danish Royal Family, related to Prince Phillip, who spent Christmas at Sandringham, mentored Prince Harry and who read Putin’s email. He hated Putin with all his strength, claimed to be a General in US Intelligence, had worked in Reagan White House, and spent his time dropping into NATO, the EU, and Defence Departments in countries adjacent to Russia in the service of marshalling power against Putin, surrounding him with armies and bases and, as it turns out, bioweapons labs. He was also, tongue-in-cheek, “6’8″, devastatingly handsome and mind-blowingly rich”. He posted a dozen times a day, hilarious, way too bright, and substantive. Around the time that the first lie emerged about the Russia Hoax, which he claimed to have helped invent, he said he was in at the War Office in Romania, and to “start no trouble whilst he worked”.
Then he vanished.
And whether he was a genius kid in the basement or a mock-up by MI6 counter-intelligence meant to influence the influential, he serves as a type, the type that got us into this mess, where we are ghost-walking into nuclear conflict. The British since McKinder have had it out for the Russians and Russia-hate is baked into their intellectual class. Did the U.S. blow up Nordstream? Maybe, maybe not, but we very probably paid for it. More like MI6 and General Farll did the deed, and theirs is the ghastly world we now inhabit.
The early neo-cons promoted war as a way to get the “common” people “exhilarated and unified”. Get them off rock and roll, sex and shopping onto a spiritual crusade for “democracy”, they thought, demonstrating one of the aspects of this type: they didn’t have much fun in high school.
Iraq 1 and 2 were a result of this thinking. And now Ukraine. This crowd has spent almost a decade since Trump’s throwaway remark that maybe we should ally with Russia, stirring up hate. This entirely, entirely to cover for their thefts and crimes. And now they present us with another opportunity to be exhilarated and unified. Aren’t we just blessed?
If the Ukraine had signed and executed Minsk 2, we wouldn’t be in this mess. This was created by slender boy-men like Antony Blinken and little-girl-women like Samantha Power and Victoria Nuland, playing the Great Game without any notion of the actual effect of their ambitions on those they see as servile nothings, good for tax dollars like us, or foreign meatsuits to bomb to death. They have killed or wounded 500,000 Ukrainians in the last two years. Britain alone has issued 190,000 visas to terrified Ukrainians. Soros’s 2014 Color Revolution, where they installed a puppet over an actually elected Russian-friendly President, started the rush and ever since it’s all Pryam Farll angling for nuclear conflict.
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Of course this is all centered around the intellectual fatuity of the Davos plan to enslave humanity in a technocratic prison because “climate change”. Russia under Putin is rapidly reclaiming its thousand year old culture, reintegrating the church, refusing the revolting ambi-sexual garbage of our culture. Davos couldn’t tolerate that. Plus Davos Man wants Russian resources, the vast wealth locked up in the steppes and Siberian wastes can power unimaginable wealth. So, they are willing to destroy the culture that created Tolstoy. No other literature approaches Russia’s in its prime, nor is there a more transcendent music. This is what Big Money and Davos want to bend to the west’s corrupt values? Imagine the arrogance it takes to decide to destroy a 1000 year old culture. And one that is nuclear-armed. And to do it with the bodies of Ukrainians.
They will spend eternity experiencing the pain of those families they ruined in service of their vanity. The sooner we get rid of them, the better.
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