Quotulatiousness

March 4, 2023

Persistent fantasies about lost Ice Age civilizations

Filed under: Environment, History, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

When I was a teen, there seemed to be a lot of pop-sci books on the racks at our local variety store pushing various notions about “highly advanced” but lost civilizations, often attributing things like UFO sightings to these imagined prehistoric groups and tying various conspiracy theories back to them. At Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander argues against today’s fans of such unlikely scenarios:

You can separate these kinds of claims into three categories:

  1. Civilizations about as advanced as the people who built Stonehenge
  2. Civilizations about as advanced as Pharaonic Egypt
  3. Civilizations about as advanced as 1700s Great Britain

The debate is confused by people doing a bad job clarifying which of these categories they’re proposing, or not being aware that the other categories exist.

2 and 3 aren’t straw men. Robert Schoch says the Sphinx was built in 9700 BC, which I think qualifies as 2. Graham Hancock suggests “ancient sea kings” drew the Piri Reis map which seems to depict Antarctica; anyone who can explore Antarctica must be at least close to 1700s-British level.

I think there’s weak evidence against level 1 civilizations, and strong evidence against level 2 or 3 civilizations.

Argument 1: Where Are The Sites?

Supporters of ice age civilizations argue that sea level rose 120 meters as the Ice Age glaciers melted, flooding low-lying coasts and destroying any evidence of coastal civilizations.

Areas likely above water during the Ice Age are in orange-brown (source)

What would happen to the ancient civilizations we know about if sea level rose an additional 120m? We would lose Babylon, Rome, and most of Egypt. But:

  • The Acropolis of Athens is 150m above sea level, and would be preserved for future archaeologists. Sparta (200m) and Thebes (250m) would also be fine.
  • The Hittite capital of Hattusa is almost 1,000m above sea level and would be totally unaffected.
  • The two biggest cities in Assyria, Ashur and Nineveh, would both make it.
  • Zhengzhou, the capital of the Shang in ancient Chinese, would survive.
  • Mohenjo-Daro would sink, but Harappa would be fine.
  • Basically nobody in Elam/Medea/Persia would even notice.
  • The top 80m of the Great Pyramid would rise above the waterline, forming a little island. The part of the Pyramid above the water would still be taller than the entire Leaning Tower of Pisa. It would be pretty hard to miss!

So a 120m sea level rise wouldn’t be enough to wipe out evidence of our crop of ancient civilizations, and shouldn’t be enough to wipe out evidence of a previous crop, unless they had a very different geographic distribution than ours.

Corruption? In Arizona? It’s more disturbing than you think

Filed under: Americas, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Elizabeth Nickson digs into the allegations of massive corruption in the state of Arizona:

Governor Katie Hobbs speaking with attendees at a Statehood Day ceremony in the Old Senate Chambers at the Arizona State Capitol building in Phoenix, Arizona on 14 February, 2023.
Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.

One always likes a unifying theory, particularly one that explicates a thorny mystery rigorously ignored by the super-culture, by which I mean the world that the educated and financially secure occupy.

For instance: why was the preponderance of evidence of election fraud ignored by the courts? How did corruption in city and county governments take hold? Why are desperate people flooding the borders unchecked? Why is human and child sex trafficking so prevalent and not stopped? Why are we permitting our fellow citizens to become human wrecks in open-air drug markets? Why are our biggest cities degrading? Why, in so many cities, is middle class housing out of reach for the middle class?

The answer may be because a significant number of elected and appointed officials have been bribed by cartels and other criminal enterprises like the CCP or Asian gangs, like the ones operating in Vancouver, Seattle and San Francisco. And they are bribed through single family housing, bidding up and up and up the price of real estate.

Late last week, an extraordinary hearing took place in the Arizona Senate, whiphanded by Liz Harris, the chair of the committee investigating election fraud in Arizona. Only Harris expected the last presentation, and it was given by a woman we have all met in the nether worlds of finance when we are re-mortgaging, insuring, reinsuring, or investing in a local enterprise.

She is competent, reductionist, modest, and honest to a fault. She knows the paperwork she slides in front of you for signature, willing to describe every phrase in exhaustive detail.

One of those invisible people upon whom the entire system relies.

Jacqueline Breger was a single mother who owns her own insurance company, has multiple degrees, in accounting, an MBA, and various other necessary finance-industry certifications. She works with her husband1, an investigative attorney named John Thaler.

The story she told had half of America transfixed. Her testimony was based on that of a whistleblower from the Sinaloa cartel given during an application for witness protection, and the subsequent acquisition of 120,000 court documents that prove the case.

Nobody could believe it. Even those who would benefit by it if it were true, didn’t believe it. In the dozen or so interviews that followed the testimony, questions were barked at her and her employer with no small measure of hostility. Rick Santelli of CNBC looked as if all his hair was standing on end.

It starts this way:

In 2006, members of the Sinaloan cartel were arrested, tried and convicted for money laundering through single family homes in Illinois, Iowa and Indiana.

In 2014, Berger’s partner, John Thaler was asked to review the Sinaloan cases in Illinois, Indiana and Iowa and investigate whether the cartel had moved its enterprise to Arizona. Currently, the couple are working with several States Attorneys, the Attorneys General of New Mexico and California, and members of the FBI.

So this is a theory that requires attention.

    1. Thaler and Berger are married. Thaler’s ex-wife was the Sinaloan cartel member who requested witsec, and decanted the evidence which triggered the acquisition of the thousands of forged and fake documents. Much of the story is focused on the domestic drama, as if domestic drama were not a part of everyone’s life at one time or another. I am more interested in discovering the truth of the matter.

Thompson SMG Cases: Police, FBI, and Secret Service

Filed under: Government, History, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 3 Nov 2022

The Auto Ordnance company made a couple of different types of cases for the Thompson SMG, and today we are going to look at two of the most common and one exceptionally cool type. The two most typically found are the Police and FBI cases. Both of these hold the gun along with the detached stock, one drum, and four box magazines. The Police type has the drum and box mags separated for balance and was lined with purple velvet; the FBI case was generally blue velvet and had all the magazines on the left (making it balance poorly).

The other case we have today is one fabricated by the Secret Service for one of its protective details. This is a flat-lying wooden case, which holds the gun, stock, and four box magazines — no drums for the Service.
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QotD: Profit margins in the restaurant trade

Filed under: Business, Economics, Food, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

This is an old rule of thumb, no more, from an experienced waitron unit.

The table that orders a starter, main and a bottle of wine – that just about breaks even for the restaurant. You can mix and match this a bit. Dessert instead of the starter, that sorta thing. But the costs of the building, the staff, the electricity, the stock that goes off, the cost of capital itself, all those things, mean that the basic restaurant experience just about covers its costs.

It’s the having the one thing extra that makes the money, the profit. A drink before the meal, having both a starter and a dessert to add to the main. The second bottle of wine, or the digestif with the coffee. This is why the waiter is so eager for you to have any one or more of these “extras”. The margin over food costs – food costs usually being around 30% of menu price – on those additions is exactly what provides a profit to the business that is the restaurant.

As to why, well, it’s the same reason that the menu prices of some well known item are going to be roughly the same across restaurants. Competition is fierce in the business. That means headline prices are pushed down to where they only just, if even that, cover costs. On exactly the same basis as Ryanair charging you spit for the seat and then a fortune for the air you breathe onboard. You get the punter in with the £20 for two steak dinners then hope like Hell they order the vanilla soup and also the vegetable ice cream in order to make your nut.

Tim Worstall, “Bar Owner Complains Of People Drinking Tap Water – Oi! Where’s My Profits?”, Continental Telegraph, 2019-05-27.

March 3, 2023

Progressives have steadily transitioned to the movement that denies that any personal conduct rules should apply

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Freddie deBoer challenges his fellow leftists to identify who were the theorists that introduced the notion that personal responsibility is an anti-socialist position:

The woman whose account appears at the top of this picture started a Twitter storm, somehow, by publicly wishing that she could take her child onto the subway without exposing them to secondhand smoke. She was beset by a certain online species of ostensible leftist who is against ever trying to enforce any kind of rule, anywhere, ever. See, rules are the hand of oppression, or something, and since most of society’s rules are meant to be enforced by the police, trying to enforce them (merely wishing that they be enforced) is an endorsement of the police and their violence …

I find this attitude has become inescapable. It’s not just the attitude that the enforcement of societal rules and norms is bad, but that this is the default assumption of all right-thinking people — it’s not just a left-wing perspective but the left-wing perspective. Like so much else in contemporary left-of-center discourse, it demonstrates the total ideological poverty we’re working with. Nobody has read anything, so nobody knows anything, so you’re constantly getting yelled at by self-described radicals who have no solid footing in any systematic approach to left politics at all. Like I said before, we’re living in definitional collapse; the struggle right now is not merely that socialism can’t win but that so many self-described socialists have no deeper ideological moorings than whatever they’ve absorbed from Tumblr and “breadtube”. They think that to be a socialist means to disdain all rules because there is no substance to their socialism at all.

Chris Hayes considered the subway smoking problem last year.

Conceptually, I don’t think these problems are hard at all: the left, the socialist left, has never advocated for a system in which there are literally no expectations on personal behavior. It’s quite bizarre to suggest that this was ever a thing! Only certain extreme forms of anarchism have ever implied that society should have no rules. Go back through the history of socialist theorists and number all of the ones who believed that there should be no laws and no police to enforce them. You won’t find many! Instead you’ll find people who believed in the need for both laws that govern human behavior and constabulary forces to enforce those laws. That’s the solution to the conundrum, my friends — you have rules and you have police that enforce those rules. The belief, and the hope, is that a socialist society is one with far less need for aggressive policing, thanks to far greater economic equality, and maybe someday, after the end of material need, we can consider a policeless society. But not having any social rules or people who enforce those rules is not a socialist concept and never has been. What I would ask Chris Hayes and people like him is … what is the leftist tradition that you’re drawing from that implies that there should be no enforcement of behavioral norms? What thinker? What book? What philosophy? Or, could it be that you’ve developed this totally substance-free approach to basic order because you’ve been habituated to talking this way through exposure to people on social media who know nothing about anything in particular?

Of course, there’s big problems with American policing. Very big problems indeed. So what we do is reform policing. (I address this at length in my next book, coming this fall from Simon & Schuster.) Alternatively, if you’re really committed to this “no rules, no enforcement” thing, you become an anarchist of a very particular stripe — most versions of anarchism have both rules and enforcement mechanisms for them — and you and your compatriots can try to change the system. All twelve of you. In the house your wealthy parents bought for you.

African Opinion in the War, Minor Axis Partners, and Foreign Ships in the British Navy – OOTF 30

Filed under: Africa, Britain, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 2 Mar 2023

How did the British manage their multinational Merchant Navy who are the non-American operators of Liberty ships? How did Kenyans, South Africans, and others from Britain’s Sub-Saharan empire view the war? And what is going on in Slovakia and Hungary right now? Find out in this episode of Out of the Foxholes.
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Conservatives keep re-enacting the Charlie Brown “kick the football” scenario

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Theophilus Chilton on the evergreen Charlie Brown and Lucy impersonations of the conservatives and progressives in western political struggles:

If there is one thing that becomes apparent when you talk to a lot of normie conservatives, it is that they have absolutely no idea how or why they keep getting rolled over by the radical Left. They work and they work and they work to win elections, they invest their time and money to get “their guy” into office, only to find him selling them out on the first important issue within a month of taking office. They pass laws, only to be thwarted in the courts. When they win in the courts, they get thwarted by the bureaucracy. They try and try to force government to abide by the Constitution, but find that this document applies in one direction only. No matter what they do, they simply cannot keep Cthulhu from swimming left.

Why is this?

It’s because they fundamentally don’t understand how power actually works. In a sense, normie conservatives long for a world that never existed. They desperately want to “keep” a republic where politicians work for the public good and where government is truly restrained by its founding document. So it’s something of a bitter pill for them to swallow when they finally accept that such a thing doesn’t exist, and really hasn’t existed in any reasonable form in the United States since the Civil War. America has continued to move left for the past 150 years because the Left has been perfectly willing to do whatever it takes to win. The Left has become adept at “manipulating procedural outcomes,” by which is meant the ability to game the system to make an existing structure which is “supposed” to operate one way bring about outcomes which were never really intended (or even considered possible) by the people who put it into place.

How do you get around constitutional restraints on, say, gun laws or federal encroachments on state prerogatives? Well, one example would be to use fraud and deceit to subvert the Constitution’s provision for elections to get your people in office, who then use the Constitution’s provisions for nominating and approving judges to get friendly judges in power, who then use the (dubiously) constitutional provision for judicial review to decide that whatever laws you want to pass are “constitutional.” Other than the initial fraud (which, since you run the show now, isn’t going to be challenged in any substantive way), everything you did was “technically” in line with the Constitution, even though the results are quite the opposite of what was actually intended. Wanna pack the Supreme Court? Technically, it’s legal! Ban political speech you don’t like? Call it “hate speech” and enforce it under provisions in administrative law that have already been allowed to stand by your judges. The Left has become very adept at appearing to “follow the rules” while working the system to undermine that same system for its own ends.

So that’s “how” the Left always seems to beat conservatives, even when conservatives manage to win an election. But WHY does this happen?

It happens because conservatives ALLOW it to happen.

Let’s be brutally honest here – normie conservatives are saps. They continue to play a rigged game, no matter how often they lose. And they do so because they believe it is virtuous to hold onto “principles” which inevitably lead to failure after failure. They never consider that if “holding to their principles” means the destruction of everything they profess to hold dear, then those principles are terrible principles that should perhaps be reconsidered. If you pat yourself on the back for your virtue in “playing by the rules” even as your house burns down around you and the neighbours are making off with all your stuff, then you’re the source of the problem. Don’t blame somebody else for capitalising on your stupidity.

Miles Davis – “So What” (Official Video)

Filed under: History, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Miles Davis
Published 19 Oct 2010

Official music video for “So What” by Miles Davis
Listen to Miles Davis: https://MilesDavis.lnk.to/listenYD

[Come for Miles Davis, stay for the John Coltrane solo]
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QotD: What’s the opposite of university? “Diversity”

Filed under: Education, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

That was one of the things that made faculty meetings such joys, back in my professin’ days — no matter how trivial the issue at hand, the meeting couldn’t move forward until everyone had gotten up on xzyher soapbox and delivered xzheyr standard diatribe. “As a post-structuralist lesbian Maoist furry, I feel that …” The outside observer would see a room full of identical freaks, but the people inside saw a glorious rainbow of diversity. Real diversity. God help us, they really did. They really do. It’s one of the keys to understanding them.

Severian, “Advice to Young Dissidents”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-04-01.

March 2, 2023

Anti-Tank Chats #6 | The Panzerfaust | The Tank Museum

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Tank Museum
Published 4 Nov 2022

Historian Stuart Wheeler is back with another anti-tank chat. In this episode, he is looking at the development and use of the legendary panzerfaust.
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QotD: The rise of the overeducated mediocrity

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Education, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Of recent months, several children of friends of mine have asked my help in preparing what they call a personal statement in their application for a job or place at university. Why they should ask me to help them is a bit of a mystery; I am glad to say that I made my career, such as it was, before these invitations to unctuous self-advertisement were even heard of.

The son of a friend of mine applied for a place at medical school and was turned down on the grounds that his personal statement was inadequate. I don’t know what was wrong with it; perhaps he employed incorrect old clichés rather than the correct new ones. Having the means to do so, my friend sent his son to a tutor who specialized in personal statements (every bureaucratic requirement is an economic opportunity for an ex-bureaucrat wanting to strike out for himself). No doubt the tutor in personal statements advised him to put in more about his passion for social justice and equality. At any rate, it worked and he was accepted.

In these statements — apparently as much a requirement in the private sector as in the public — you have to not only explain why you have dreamt all your life of this position in the marketing department (selling the unnecessary to the insolvent) and why you, of all the 7,000,000,000 people in the world, are the most suited to it, but also proclaim your deep sense of social responsibility, which you will bring to whatever task you are told to perform. People have never been entirely straightforward, thank goodness (what need of art and literature if they had been?), but we do seem to be breeding up a generation of Pecksniffs and Uriah Heeps.

I don’t want to indulge in what has been called the hermeneutics of suspicion, the habit of finding the supposedly real, occult, and sinister explanation behind perfectly straightforward social phenomena, but nevertheless I cannot help but wonder what the true purpose is of mission statements and their cognates, such as annual declarations of probity and the like. I think (though of course I cannot indubitably prove) that it is to make the world safe for overeducated mediocrities.

Theodore Dalrymple, “In Defense of Mediocrity”, Taki’s Magazine, 2018-02-17.

March 1, 2023

Our modern age of “squishy totalitarianism”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Bray on the odd controlling habits of our “great and good”, our “moral and intellectual superiors” to urge us to follow their directives “for our own good” (or else):

The anarchist philosopher Crispin Sartwell describes our political culture as one of “squishy totalitarianism”, a term I like quite a bit. (See the third page of this document.) You can disagree and refuse to comply, and the secret police won’t show up at your door (with maybe a growing list of exceptions). We don’t have a gulag. We don’t have the “culture of the disappeared“. You just … maybe find yourself with fewer friends, and some family that stops talking to you, and maybe your employer lets you know that hey, you know what, this doesn’t seem to be working out.

It’s not the Great Terror, it’s just a kind of low-grade grind of social decredentialing that lets you know you’re not making the right choices. We need to rethink Thanksgiving this year, because we’re very disappointed in you. (Don’t you want to be safe?) The way Google searches are working these days is a pretty good example of squishy totalitarianism: Oh, I’m sorry, we have no results for that widely known piece of wrongthink, but here are some results that debunk the conspiracy theory you’re searching for. Wouldn’t you prefer to read a correct search result?

[…]

We can debate the origins and the motive force behind the constant parade of error that has plagued us over the last three years: useless mask mandates, aggressively harmful school closures, insanely damaging vaccine mandates, ludicrous closures of beaches and parks, the pearl clutching over all those conspiracy theories about a lab leak.

You know the terms of the debate: Is the world led by idiots who are screwing it all up, or is this a plan that they’re executing on purpose?

But whichever answer turns out to be correct, one thing that seems extremely clear to me is that this perpetual reign of error couldn’t possibly go on without the unthinking enforcement activity of a distributed commissariat, the slogan-repeating upper-middle-class-aligned cultural apparatus that endlessly lawn signs their compliance. No one has to tell journalists to scold Woody Harrelson: they already know. The moment the Woodster engaged in crimethink, the Rolling Stone writer Marlow Stern started salivating like a trained dog hearing a bell. Vast armies of professors and HR specialists and marketing executives and bureaucrats and Hollywood functionaries and school board wokescolds and on and on and on already know their roles without being assigned to them. It is not correct for you to fail to comply with Current Thing; you are spewing conspiracy theories.

    Doctor, the symptoms began shortly after I received the second dose of the Covid vaccine.

    No, that is not possible, vaccines do not cause injuries. Let us not discuss this conspiracy theory any further. Here are some pills.

We have an enforcement apparatus made up of people who volunteered for the job. In terms of social class, we have the lower class, the lower-middle-class, the middle class, the Stasi, and the upper class.

School Lunch from the Great Depression

Filed under: Food, France, Germany, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 28 Feb 2023
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If the Freedom Convoy “actually was what it has often been portrayed as on social media — a horde of thousands of literal Nazis and Confederates set on violently overthrowing our democratically elected government — then [we’d] be living in the Confederate Republic of Nazi Canada by now”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Matt Gurney explains how going through Justice Paul Rouleau’s Public Order Emergency Commission report in detail leads to some uncomfortable realizations about Canadian goverment and policing — at all three levels — failed to meet minimal expectations of competency and capacity:

A screenshot from a YouTube video showing the protest in front of Parliament in Ottawa on 30 January, 2022.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

The convoy crisis — and I’m mostly speaking here about the events in Ottawa, though the situation at the border crossings fit the same general pattern — forced Canadian police and political leaders to respond quickly to evolving circumstances. And Rouleau’s report is just a relentlessly brutal catalogue of the ways they failed.

Is it really necessary at this point to recap the failure of the Ottawa police? We at The Line have long maintained that the complete failure of the Ottawa police to plan for and control the protest not only allowed the convoy to entrench itself, but also established the psychological paradigm that would define the crisis for weeks: the convoyers held the initiative (not to mention the capital) and the Canadian state was befuddled and adrift. From that, a national crisis was born. Rouleau is just devastating. “The OPS [Ottawa Police Service]’s planning challenges,” he notes on page 56 of the first volume, “were compounded by a general breakdown of command and control.” Super.

He’s even more brutal on page 185 of the second volume: “The influx of Freedom Convoy vehicles and the disruptive behaviour by some protesters threw the OPS operational command at the NCRCC [a command centre] into a state of dysfunction. OPS Inspector Lucas described the atmosphere at the NCRCC as chaotic and explained that he and his team had neither the capacity to process the incoming information nor the resources to respond to the needs it was facing. In the late afternoon of January 29, the OPP’s [Ontario Provincial Police] representative at the NCRCC, Inspector Dawn Ferguson, reported to OPP Superintendent Abrams that OPS members in the NCRCC were panicked and were swearing and yelling orders at each other and at partner agencies.”

Huh.

Moving up a level of government, much has already been written about the cowardice of the Ford government. If any agency performed semi-well, it was the Ontario Provincial Police. The OPP was the force that was generating most of the critical intelligence used (or ignored) during the crisis. It was quick to realize that command-and-control had collapsed in Ottawa (see above), and to begin working with the RCMP on a plan — eventually a series of plans — to restore order. You can’t read POEC and conclude the OPP performed perfectly. Far from it. It was probably the best we had, though, but because Ford took a gander at the mess in Ottawa and decided to mosey on off to the cottage, it couldn’t do much.

Huh.

And that leaves us with the feds. I have maintained since last year that the federal government hasn’t received nearly enough attention in our understanding of what the hell went wrong last year. This has caused a fair degree of pushback, especially from Liberal supporters who read any reference to the “federal government” as “our beloved prime minister”. But no — while I don’t think the prime minister or the federal cabinet did particularly well during the crisis, the real federal failures were in the officials that supported the PM and his ministers.

Among the many other failures, the inability of the various government and police organizations to organize and properly share the information they were handling is perhaps the most disturbing:

If you want to see it yourself, check out pages 38 and 39 of the third volume. For those in a hurry, though, it turns out that even within the government, the flow of information was so bad that the clerk of the privy council, and the prime minister, noted that staff were learning about the convoy not via internal reports, but social media. The federal government had, as Juneau and Rigby have noted, “intelligence gaps” that “hampered the government’s ability to understand, anticipate, and respond to the situation, and to reconcile conflicting information such as contradictory reports about the size of the convoy”. The federal government didn’t have the software to process and analyze online posts, even public ones.

And then there was this (my emphasis added):

    [National Security and Intelligence Advisor] Thomas also described an information-sharing gap between law enforcement and government. Assistant Secretary to the Cabinet, Security and Intelligence, Michael MacDonald recalled a significant delay in receiving updates from the RCMP, due to the RCMP’s obligation to consult with each intelligence agency that has provided the RCMP with information prior to sharing that information further (known as the “third party rule”). The NSIA’s office did not receive situation reports, project reports, or other forms of information, such as Project Hendon reports, that the RCMP obtained from other law enforcement agencies. Prior to the events of the convoy, the NSIA was not aware of Project Hendon. …

    NSIA Thomas further stated that it was sometimes difficult to know how to interact with law enforcement agencies. She recognized that government must not interfere in operational matters, but thought that there was nonetheless useful information that could have been provided to decision makers without encroaching upon police independence. However, senior officials were uncertain how to obtain that information, and were concerned about “crossing the line” both in requesting information and in discussing solutions.

… huh.

And that doesn’t even cover our now-outgoing national commissioner of the RCMP being so clueless she decided to just not mention germane information during a critical meeting because … well, we never really got a good explanation for that one. Oh well. Enjoy your retirement, Commissioner Lucki!

Mauser WW1 Flyer’s Rifle: the Flieger Selbstlader Karabiner 1916

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Weapons, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 1 Nov 2022

Paul Mauser dedicated much of his life to the development of a practical semiauto military rifle, and did manage to have a design that was used in combat by Germany in World War One. It began with the model 06/08, a short-recoil, flap-locked design made in both rifle and pistol form. The short recoil idea was disliked by the military for a shoulder rifle, and so Mauser redesigned it to be inertially locked with a fixed barrel. This was sold in small numbers as a sporting rifle, and tested by the military a few years before the war. Once war began, Mauser once again submitted the design for use in an infantry configuration, but the system was too delicate for infantry combat. A second pattern was made for use by fliers, and this was accepted and used in service for that brief period between the introduction of military aviation and the adoption of aerial machine guns.

Designated the FSK-16 (FliegerSelbstladeKarabiner 1916), it was used primarily by balloon and Zeppelin crews. With a large magazine and self-loading action, it was much better for use in aircraft than the typical bolt action infantry rifles — and there was no mud to get into the action while airborne.
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