Lycurgus was the name the Spartans gave for their mythical founder figure, a Spartan who had supposedly lived in the late 9th century and had set up the Spartan society as we see it in the classical period. Almost all of our details for his life come from a biography by Plutarch, written c. 100 A.D. (date to be significant in a moment). The story the Spartans told went thusly:
Once upon a time … there was a Spartan named Lycurgus, and he was the very best Spartan …
Lycurgus had been the younger brother of one of Sparta’s two kings, but had left Sparta to travel when his brother died, so that he would be no threat to his young nephew.
After a time, the Spartans begged Lycurgus to come back and reorganize society, and Lycurgus – with the blessing of the Oracle at Delphi – radically remade Spartan society into the form it would have for the next 400 years. He did not merely change the government, but legislated every facet of life, from child-rearing to marriage, to the structure of households, the economic structure, everything. Once he had accomplished that, Lycurgus went back to Delphi, but before he left he made all the Spartans promise not to change his laws until he returned. Once the Oracle told him his laws were good, he committed suicide, so that he would never return to Sparta, thus preventing his laws from ever being overturned. So the Spartans never changed Lycurgus’ laws, which had been declared perfect by Apollo himself. Subsequently, the Spartans accorded Lycurgus divine honors, and within Sparta he was worshiped as a god.
And that’s how Lycurgus remade Sparta. The End.
The role Lycurgus serves in the sources is as the perfect, infallible founder figure. No less than the Oracle at Delphi – the divine word of Apollo – declared Lycurgus a god (Hdt. 1.65.3). For later sources who, we must stress – believe their own religion (as people everywhere are wont to do) – that means, essentially a priori that Lycurgus’ “constitution” must be practically flawless and all flaws must stem from its imperfect implementation.
But – wait a second – what is our evidence for the actual person of Lycurgus or the character of the state he set up?
Remember how I said Lycurgus is dated to the late 9th century – specifically the 820s B.C. or so. That’s a huge problem. The earliest Greek literature comes from around (very roughly – there is deep scholarly debate here that I’m glossing over) the mid-8th century (c. 750 or so) and is entirely mythological in nature. The first actual history is Herodotus, writing in the mid-400s. The earliest historical event we have evidence for is the Lelantine War (c. 700ish), at least a century after the life of Lycurgus. None of our sources have anything to go on about Lycurgus – save for what the Spartans – who already worship this figure as a god – tell them. Crucially, Tyrtaeus, writing in the 650s B.C., while he does mention the rhetra (an oracle the Spartans received concerning the arrangement of their government) does not mention Lycurgus (although Plutarch is quick to connect the two, Plut. Lyc. 6.5), meaning that the earliest source for Lycurgus’ existence is Herodotus.
Wait, it gets even better – the one thing we do know about Lycurgus’ laws is that they were not written down (Plut. Lyc. 13.1). Also, Lycurgus supposedly took steps to prevent his remains from returning to Sparta (Plut. Lyc. 29.5-6, but cf. 31.4) and no continued family line, which seems like exactly the sort of explanation you put at the end of a good campfire story for why there was absolutely no trace of such an important man save his legend. So not only the details of Lycrugus’ life, but also the society he created will have lived as oral tradition – potentially changing from one telling to the next, being embellished or expanded – for generations before being committed to the permanent, unchanging memory of written history.
In short, our only evidence for Lycurgus are the campfire stories told about him by people who worshiped him as a god, as related to individuals centuries later. Which is to say that, by historical standards, there is no reliable evidence at all that Lycurgus existed.
[…]
Lycurgus is often set against Solon – the early 6th century Athenian reformer. It is true that Athenians also tend to attribute things to Solon that were later developments, but we need to note the key differences: Solon comes two centuries after Lycurgus (thus, unlike Lycurgus, in the historical period), didn’t receive divine honors and most importantly writes to us (he wrote poetry, some of which survives), so that we can know he was an actual real person. Asking students – as I have seen done – to compare a real, flawed reformer with an idealized, semi-mythical demi-god without any kind of guidance as to the nature of these two figures is, quite frankly, educational malpractice.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part III: Spartan Women”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-08-29.
June 30, 2022
QotD: Sparta had Lycurgus, while Athens had Solon … who at least actually existed
June 29, 2022
A very charitable view of Canada’s Indo-Pacific naval involvement
In a post on the IISS Military Balance Blog, James Hackett extends far more charity toward the Canadian government’s “incremental growth” of naval activities in the Pacific and Indian Oceans than it may deserve. Given the already stretched nature of the Royal Canadian Navy under ordinary conditions, a cynic might be tempted to speculate what other activities and training will have to be foregone to allow the noted two-ship deployment for several months overseas:
A Chilean navy boarding team fast-ropes onto the flight deck of RCN Halifax-class frigate HMCS Calgary (FFH 335) during multinational training exercise Fuerzas Aliadas PANAMAX 2009.
US Navy photo via Wikimedia.
On 14 June, Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) frigates HMCS Winnipeg and HMCS Vancouver left their berths at Esquimalt naval base in British Columbia, bound for the US-led Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) 2022 exercise, due to take place from 29 June to 4 August. The ships will then set a westerly course for a five-month deployment in the Indo-Pacific, principally to support Canada’s Operation Projection. This is the first twin deployment of its kind since 2017 and heralds a bolstering of Canada’s defence contribution in the region, with new naval investments on the way to help sustain it, but will they be enough?
[…]
However, a number of the building blocks to help sustain Canada’s regional defence ambitions are still being put in place. In 2016 the RCN retired the last of its Protecteur-class oiler and replenishment vessels and, for a time, resorted to hiring Chilean and Spanish ships to maintain replenishment capability amid delays in the project to replace the class. In 2018, as an interim measure it introduced the converted German container vessel MV Asterix into the role of an at-sea replenishment vessel and oiler.
The first of two new Joint Support Ships (JSSs) will be delivered in 2023. Also called the Protecteur-class, these ships are being built in Vancouver. They form a key part of Canada’s ambitious National Shipbuilding Strategy, alongside new class of surface combatants and Arctic patrol vessels. Based on the German Brandenburg-class design, the JSSs are intended to be compatible with Canada’s afloat combat platforms, boasting combat systems, tactical data links and defensive weapons systems. What role Canada’s submarine flotilla might play in an enhanced Indo-Pacific posture is uncertain, although one submarine, HMCS Chicoutimi, undertook an unusual deployment into the region in 2017/18.
Whether two JSSs will be enough in terms of naval logistic support at sea also remains an open question and there has even been talk of extending the lease on MV Asterix. The RCN will, nonetheless, have regenerated its sovereign at-sea replenishment capability once the new ships are in service. Alongside the other planned capability enhancements, the future RCN should be a more capable force than it is today. With the two new Protecteur-class vessels in service, the RCN should be more operationally sustainable and also better able to offer some of the broader non-combat defence assistance that may be required on the engagement and training tasks seen in missions like Operation Projection.
It’s always a foolish bet that any major equipment for the Canadian military will be delivered on time or under budget, and the Joint Support Ship project is unlikely to change that. The ships were originally announced in 2004, but between changes of government and re-imagining the entire RCN shipbuilding program, the contracts were not signed until 2020. Initially, $2.6 billion was allocated to purchase two vessels with an option for a third. It didn’t take long for budget realities to cancel the optional ship, and by 2020, it was reported that the anticipated final cost will be $4.1 billion. Unlike pretty much every other shipbuilding project, the Project Resolve ship MV Asterix was accepted into service in 2018, both on time and within budget … perhaps because this was a conversion of an existing hull rather than an all-new build.
The next major step after the JSS project is completed is to roll out the replacements for the Halifax-class frigates and the already-retired Iroquois-class destroyers. It will theoretically consist of 15 hulls, but as we usually see in naval expenditure, if the RCN ends up getting a dozen they may consider themselves lucky. The ships will be based on the British Type 26 frigate design.
An artist’s rendition of BAE’s Type 26 Global Combat Ship, which was selected as the Canadian Surface Combatant design in 2019, the most recent “largest single expenditure in Canadian government history” (as all major weapon systems purchases tend to be).
(BAE Systems, via Flickr)
Construction of the Canadian Type 26 ships is “expected” to begin in 2024. Gamblers may want to place their bets on how close to that date actual fabrication begins and by just how much the budget will be overshot by the time a few of the ships enter service in the “early 2030s”.
COVID Exposed the Truth About the CDC
ReasonTV
Published 28 Jun 2022The agency will never be controlled by fact-driven experts shielded from politics.
——————-
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was once widely viewed as the gold standard in public health, considered an apolitical, science-driven bulwark against all pathogen threats, foreign and domestic.Today, trust in the agency has plummeted because COVID-19 exposed the truth: The CDC is thoroughly corruptible, and federal regulators will never be impartial experts. They respond to political incentives just like everyone else, and a fact-driven, purely technocratic state is an impossible dream.
The Trump administration pressured the CDC to narrow the scope of testing so case counts would drop, blocked officials from doing interviews, and edited its flagship scientific reports. The CDC provided a scientifically dubious public health rationale for rejecting migrants at the southern border. President Joe Biden continued that policy, and under his purview, CDC guidance on school closures was surreptitiously written by leaders of the country’s second-largest teachers union.
Tom Frieden, a former CDC director, co-authored a 2021 op-ed with three other former agency heads expressing hope that Biden’s incoming CDC Director Rochelle Walensky would “restore the public’s confidence in the CDC’s scientific objectivity,” with its reputation “a shadow of what it once was.” Yet, Frieden endorsed large-scale protests against racial injustice two months after writing in The Washington Post that “the faucet of everyday activities needs to be turned on slowly. We cannot open the floodgates.” Meanwhile, public health officials were keeping people from attending the funerals of their loved ones.
And could it be pure coincidence that the CDC chose the Friday before President Biden’s State of the Union address to drop its indoor mask recommendation for the majority of Americans, even though the supporting data were months old?
In other words, it doesn’t matter who occupies the White House — political incentives mean that, no matter how dedicated or competent the career scientists who work at the CDC are, the agency will never be controlled by fact-driven experts shielded from the “hurry and strife of politics,” as Woodrow Wilson wrote. After decades of mission creep, the CDC’s role should be strictly narrowed, limited to surveillance and coordination, leaving the heavy lifting to local officials and private and academic researchers who are more reactive to direct feedback from their communities.
Written and produced by Justin Monticello. Edited by Isaac Reese. Graphics by Reese, Tomasz Kaye, and Nodehaus. Audio production by Ian Keyser.
Music: “Robotic Butterflies” by Evgeny Bardyuzha; “We Fall” by Stanley Gurvich; “Free Radicals” by Stanley Gurvich.
Photos: BSIP/Newscom; BSIP/Newscom; Sarah Silbiger/UPI/Newscom; Shawn Thew – Pool via CNP/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Alex Edelman/ZUMA Press/Newscom; SMG/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Simon Shin/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Michael Brochstein/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Adam Schultz/White House/Newscom; Brazil Photo Press / SplashNews/Newscom; Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Newscom; Polaris/Newscom; Jonathan Alpeyrie/Polaris/Newscom; Aimee Melo/dpa/picture-alliance/Newscom; Julian Stratenschulte/dpa/picture-alliance/Newscom; Sven Hoppe/dpa/picture-alliance/Newscom; CNP/AdMedia/Newscom
It’s not your imagination: young women are becoming more liberal
Daniel Cox looks at the noted shift in political opinions among young women (aged 18-29) compared to their male counterparts, and not just on the current hot-button topic of abortion rights:
… In fact, young women have become significantly more liberal over the past decade whereas the political identity of young men has remained largely unchanged over time.
Rise of Unmarried Women
There are a few reasons for the increasingly liberal politics of young women. One explanation may lie in their marital status. Compared to previous generations of young women, far more women under the age of 30 today are unmarried. Only 15 percent of young women today are married compared to more than one-third of young women two decades ago.
Why does this matter? Research has shown that unmarried women feel more connected than their married counterparts to other women — a phenomenon known as “linked fate” — and it can lead them to support more liberal policies. In their fascinating 2017 study, Christopher T. Stout, Kelsy Kretschmer, and Leah Ruppanner argue that “women consistently earn less money and hold less power, which fosters women’s economic dependency on men. Thus, it is within married women’s interests to support policies and politicians who protect their husbands and improve their status.” This phenomenon of “linked fate” was not found to be evident among men, so even though young men are also less likely to be married compared to older generations, their marital status may have less of an impact on their politics than for women.
The Growing Education Divide
Over the past several decades, women’s educational attainment has far outpaced that of men’s; “Women in the United States have earned more bachelor’s degrees than men every year since the mid-1980s”, writes Derek Thompson in the Atlantic.
American colleges and universities now enroll roughly six women for every four men. This is the largest female-male gender gap in the history of higher education, and it’s getting wider.
The education divide between men and women has become more politically relevant because of the stronger connection between educational attainment and political behavior. In recent elections, college graduates have become a much more loyal Democratic constituency. And on a range of issues, college-educated Americans are more liberal than those without a Bachelor’s degree.
How to Identify a Real M1A1 Carbine vs a Fake
Forgotten Weapons
Published 10 Feb 2018Looking for a light and compact weapon to equip its new Airborne units, the US military adopted the M1A1 Carbine in May of 1942. This was mechanically identical to the existing M1 Carbine but with a wire-frame side-folding stock in place of the standard wooden stock. This allowed the M1A1 to fit into a very handy leg bag for paratroops.
Deliveries began in October 1942, with all of the guns being manufactured by the Inland company. A total of 140,591 were made in two batches (71,000 between October 1942 and October 1943 and another 69,000 between April and December 1944). This is a very small fraction of the more than 6 million M1 Carbines made during the war, and the M1A1 has become quite notable and desirable for its association with elite Airborne units. As a result, reproduction and fake stocks abound, and are quite difficult to tell from original ones.
Today we are going to look at some of the specific features that can help you authenticate an M1A1 stock.
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QotD: How Cadet Che shows that West Point isn’t West Point anymore
Bad as that is, there’s much worse. Notice the passivity of it all. What were any of the parties involved trying to accomplish? If Cadet Che had wanted to get kicked out of the service (as it seems finally happened, according to the linked article), there are a million easier ways. In fact, cadets at West Point are volunteers. The Army makes a big production out of this: If you can’t hack it at the Point, you’re simply not officer material. All it takes is a letter to the commandant, and you’re out — Cadet Che could’ve been drinking beer with his fraternal socialist comrades at Big State 24 hours after turning in his resignation.
Even the kid’s form of “protest” was passive. There’d be a certain utility, I suppose, for the Revolution if the kid had written “I’m a Communist sleeper agent” on the inside of his hat — evidently our standards are so lax that we don’t do basic background checks on our potential military officers. But he didn’t write that. Instead, he wrote “Communism will win,” a passive, bloodless statement … and that’s it.
The passivity is the truly terrifying part. A West Point graduate is among the elite if anyone is — he has command of at least a platoon of heavily armed trained killers, and the radio one of them carries has the power to call in armor, air strikes, cruise missiles … and yet, not “I’m a communist,” not “¡Viva la Revolución!,” not even “Lenin lives!” Just … “communism will win.” How, comrade?
Severian, “The Man of the Hour”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-05-22.
June 28, 2022
If your gas can sucks – and it probably does – thank the EPA
The editors at FEE dug out an old classic article from Jeffrey A. Tucker that still holds up ten years later:
The gas gauge broke. There was no smartphone app to tell me how much was left, so I ran out. I had to call the local gas station to give me enough to get on my way. The gruff but lovable attendant arrived in his truck and started to pour gas in my car’s tank. And pour. And pour.
“Hmmm, I just hate how slow these gas cans are these days,” he grumbled. “There’s no vent on them.”
That sound of frustration in this guy’s voice was strangely familiar, the grumble that comes when something that used to work but doesn’t work anymore, for some odd reason we can’t identify.
I’m pretty alert to such problems these days. Soap doesn’t work. Toilets don’t flush. Clothes washers don’t clean. Light bulbs don’t illuminate. Refrigerators break too soon. Paint discolors. Lawnmowers have to be hacked. It’s all caused by idiotic government regulations that are wrecking our lives one consumer product at a time, all in ways we hardly notice.
It’s like the barbarian invasions that wrecked Rome, taking away the gains we’ve made in bettering our lives. It’s the bureaucrats’ way of reminding market producers and consumers who is in charge.
Surely, the gas can is protected. It’s just a can, for goodness sake. Yet he was right. This one doesn’t have a vent. Who would make a can without a vent unless it was done under duress? After all, everyone knows to vent anything that pours. Otherwise, it doesn’t pour right and is likely to spill.
It took one quick search. The whole trend began in (wait for it) California. Regulations began in 2000, with the idea of preventing spillage. The notion spread and was picked up by the EPA, which is always looking for new and innovative ways to spread as much human misery as possible.
An ominous regulatory announcement from the EPA came in 2007: “Starting with containers manufactured in 2009 … it is expected that the new cans will be built with a simple and inexpensive permeation barrier and new spouts that close automatically.”
The government never said “no vents”. It abolished them de facto with new standards that every state had to adopt by 2009. So for the last three years, you have not been able to buy gas cans that work properly. They are not permitted to have a separate vent. The top has to close automatically. There are other silly things now, too, but the biggest problem is that they do not do well what cans are supposed to do.
And don’t tell me about spillage. It is far more likely to spill when the gas is gurgling out in various uneven ways, when one spout has to both pour and suck in air. That’s when the lawn mower tank becomes suddenly full without warning, when you are shifting the can this way and that just to get the stuff out.
The Early Emperors – Part 5: Claudius, the First Normal Emperor
seangabb
Published 13 Dec 2021The Roman Empire was the last and the greatest of the ancient empires. It is the origin from which springs the history of Western Europe and those nations that descend from the Western Roman Empire. It is the political entity within which the Christian faith was born, and the growth of the Church within the Empire, and its eventual establishment as the sole faith of the Empire, have left an indelible impression on all modern denominations. Its history, together with that of the ancient Greeks and the Jews, is our history. To understand how the Empire emerged from a great though finally dysfunctional republic, and how it was consolidated by its early rulers, is partly how we understand ourselves.
Here is a series of lectures given by Sean Gabb in late 2021, in which he discusses and tries to explain the achievement of the early Emperors. For reasons of politeness and data protection, all student contributions have been removed.
More by Sean Gabb on the Ancient World: https://www.classicstuition.co.uk/
Learn Latin or Greek or both with him: https://www.udemy.com/user/sean-gabb/
His historical novels (under the pen name “Richard Blake”): https://www.amazon.co.uk/Richard-Blak…
Pierre Poilievre … not the Canadian Trump?
Allan Stratton points out to sheltered central Canadian urban voters that populism has a long history in Canadian politics, and didn’t need to be imported from the US:
Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre at a Manning Centre event, 1 March 2014.
Manning Centre photo via Wikimedia Commons.
Conservative leadership candidate Pierre Poilievre is oft accused of importing divisive American right-wing populism to our politics. His endorsement of the trucker protest against vaccine mandates — though not the legal violations of its organizers — has been portrayed as a play for Christian nationalists, racists and fascists. Likewise, his attacks on Davos and the World Economic Forum are said to welcome Trumpian conspiracy theorists, anti-Semites and Great Replacement nativists.
Common wisdom suggests that this strategy may win Poilievre the Conservative party leadership, but will render his party toxic to respectable, mainstream Canadian voters.
There’s a lot of smoke and at least some fire to this critique: The People’s Party of Canada will find it hard to tag Poilievre as a centrist squish.
But thanks to our constitution, the Supreme Court and our general political culture, all more liberal than their American counterparts, social conservative attacks on abortion and LGBT rights seem off the table.
Further, far from a Trumpian nativist, Poilievre is in favour of immigration and wants to cut the red tape that blocks immigrants from employment in their fields, something the current federal government has failed to accomplish into its third mandate.
My fear, as someone who shares many concerns about the prospect of a Poilievre government, is that commentators are misreading the broad appeal of his populism, leading Liberals to unwarranted overconfidence.
Sure, Poilievre’s strategy shares some Trumpian elements, but it’s equally rooted in a progressive Canadian tradition that dates back to the early 19th century and was prominent in the last half of the 20th.
If the Liberals don’t course correct, they may discover that while they are attacking Poilievre as a far-right extremist, he is eating their traditional liberal, working-class lunch.
In broad strokes, I imagine Poilievre channelling Louis-Joseph Papineau and William Lyon Mackenzie during the Rebellions of 1837-38. Instead of the Château Clique and the Family Compact, I see him fighting the Laurentian Consensus, another powerful, unelected group, this time composed of academics, bureaucrats, media apparatchiks and Central Canada think-tankers who dominate our culture and financial establishment — and who arrogate to themselves the right to determine Canadian values and the ways in which we are allowed to describe and think about ourselves as a nation.
For those of us who grew up on the left under Mike Pearson, Tommy Douglas, Pierre Trudeau and David Lewis, it is hard to stomach the recent illiberal turn in elite liberal discourse. It once assumed the importance of free speech, understanding that censorship has always been used by the powerful to suppress the powerless. Yet today, in academia and the arts, free speech has been recast as “hate speech”, and our Liberal government is passing C-11, which seeks to regulate what we read and how we express ourselves online.
History of Rome in 15 Buildings 15. Keats-Shelley House
toldinstone
Published 2 Oct 2018For well over a century, the “Odes” of John Keats have been boring high school students, enchanting lovers of poetry, and giving scholars of English literature interesting things to overinterpret. When he died in 1821, however, Keats was virtually unknown – an anonymous member of Rome’s large community of travelers and expatriates in the last years of the Grand Tour.
To see the story and photo essay associated with this video, go to:
https://toldinstone.com/keats-shelley…
QotD: The economic pie fallacy
When wealth is talked about in this context, it is often described as a pie. “You can’t make the pie larger,” say politicians. When you’re talking about the amount of money in one family’s bank account, or the amount available to a government from one year’s tax revenue, this is true. If one person gets more, someone else has to get less.
I can remember believing, as a child, that if a few rich people had all the money, it left less for everyone else. Many people seem to continue to believe something like this well into adulthood. This fallacy is usually there in the background when you hear someone talking about how x percent of the population have y percent of the wealth. If you plan to start a startup, then whether you realize it or not, you’re planning to disprove the Pie Fallacy.
What leads people astray here is the abstraction of money. Money is not wealth. It’s just something we use to move wealth around. So although there may be, in certain specific moments (like your family, this month) a fixed amount of money available to trade with other people for things you want, there is not a fixed amount of wealth in the world. You can make more wealth. Wealth has been getting created and destroyed (but on balance, created) for all of human history.
Suppose you own a beat-up old car. Instead of sitting on your butt next summer, you could spend the time restoring your car to pristine condition. In doing so you create wealth. The world is — and you specifically are — one pristine old car the richer. And not just in some metaphorical way. If you sell your car, you’ll get more for it.
In restoring your old car you have made yourself richer. You haven’t made anyone else poorer. So there is obviously not a fixed pie. And in fact, when you look at it this way, you wonder why anyone would think there was. *
Kids know, without knowing they know, that they can create wealth. If you need to give someone a present and don’t have any money, you make one. But kids are so bad at making things that they consider home-made presents to be a distinct, inferior, sort of thing to store-bought ones — a mere expression of the proverbial thought that counts. And indeed, the lumpy ashtrays we made for our parents did not have much of a resale market.
* In the average car restoration you probably do make everyone else microscopically poorer, by doing a small amount of damage to the environment. While environmental costs should be taken into account, they don’t make wealth a zero-sum game. For example, if you repair a machine that’s broken because a part has come unscrewed, you create wealth with no environmental cost.
Paul Graham, “How to Make Wealth”, Paul Graham, 2004-04.
June 27, 2022
High Altitude Research Project and the Martlet Launch Vehicles; Gerald Bull’s dream of a space gun
Polyus Studios
Published 26 Jun 2022Support me on Patreon – https://www.patreon.com/polyusstudios
In 1968, 7 countries were operating satellites in orbit, while only 3 countries had the ability to launch one themselves. But they were on the verge of being joined by a Canadian university. Starting in the early 1960s, Montreal, Quebec based McGill University developed and began testing an ambitious concept to place small satellites into orbit. It was the culmination of decades of pioneering work across multiple fields. It was the High Altitude Research Project and the Martlet orbital launch vehicle.
Music:
Denmark – Portland Cello Project
Your Suggestions – Unicorn HeadsChapters:
0:00 Introduction
0:28 Bull’s early career
3:00 Birth of the Program
7:47 Getting HARP off the ground
10:52 Martlet 1
13:26 Early Martlet 2
15:41 Martlet 3
18:05 Enhanced Martlet 2s
21:40 Other HARP Guns
24:19 Quest for an Orbital Capability, the 2G-1
27:53 Satellite Delivery Model, Martlet 4
30:27 Advanced gun research
31:30 Hard times for HARP
32:30 Bull’s Ambition Gets The Best Of Him
35:28 Legacy of the HARP Project
It’s not clear where the money will come from to fund the recently announced NORAD upgrades
Aside from sticking knives in the backs of political critics, Justin Trudeau’s government loves announcing new programs and additional spending more than anything else. The boring, workaday details like actually implementing the newly announced programs … well, that sometimes gets forgotten in the rush to make new announcements. In this case, the recent announcement that Canada will be spending Cdn$4.9 billion to upgrade our contribution to NORAD for continental defence — and to no real surprise for anyone who’s been paying attention — it’s not clear even to the head of the Canadian Armed Forces just where that money is actually supposed to come from:
Canada’s defence chief says he doesn’t yet know where the money is coming from for $4.9 billion in promised upgrades to NORAD radar and surveillance systems.
In an interview with The West Block‘s Mercedes Stephenson, Gen. Wayne Eyre was asked about growing questions facing the government to detail their spending plan on NORAD upgrades.
Sources have told Global News the military is uncertain about where the funds are coming from, and that there are meetings happening at the department trying to determine how much of the money is new. Those sources say there are significant concerns that the money may not be new, and may need to be re-capitalized from within the existing defence budget.
“I haven’t completely figured out myself the source of funds for this,” Eyre said.
“So I can’t say definitively where it’s coming from. I will say, though, the announcement was welcome.”
Eyre was also asked whether the military is planning any departmental cuts in order to be able to allocate $4.9 billion to the NORAD upgrades.
“We haven’t looked at cutting. But as always, we have to look at rebalancing,” he said.
“The force that we have today is not the force that we need to support tomorrow. So we need to look at force structure. Do we have it in the right place? Do we need to look at rerolling of units so that they undertake roles that are more relevant for the future security environment? That is all important.”
Global News has asked for clarity on the question to Defence Minister Anita Anand’s office.
No answer has yet been received.
Look at Life — The Jumping Jets (1965)
PauliosVids
Published 20 Nov 2018The revolutionary vertical take-off capacity of the RAF Kestrel.
[Wikipedia: “The Hawker P.1127 and the Hawker Siddeley Kestrel FGA.1 are the British experimental and development aircraft that led to the Hawker Siddeley Harrier, the first vertical and/or short take-off and landing (V/STOL) jet fighter-bomber.
“Development began in 1957, taking advantage of the Bristol Engine Company’s choice to invest in the creation of the Pegasus vectored-thrust engine. Testing began in July 1960 and by the end of the year the aircraft had achieved both vertical take-off and horizontal flight. The test program also explored the possibility of use upon aircraft carriers, landing on HMS Ark Royal in 1963. The first three aircraft crashed during testing, one at the 1963 Paris Air Show.
“Improvements to future development aircraft, such as swept wings and more powerful Pegasus engines, led to the development of the Kestrel. The Kestrel was evaluated by the Tri-partite Evaluation Squadron, made up of military pilots from the United Kingdom, the United States, and West Germany. Later flights were conducted by the U.S. military and NASA.
“Related work on a supersonic aircraft, the Hawker Siddeley P.1154, was cancelled in 1965. As a result, the P.1127 (RAF), a variant more closely based on the Kestrel, was ordered into production that year, and named Harrier – the name originally intended for the P.1154 – in 1967. The Harrier served with the UK and several nations, often as a carrier-based aircraft.”]
QotD: Perfectionism
It has blighted more lives than autism, destroyed more potential work than brain damage, stopped more achievement than mis-education. It can devour entire civilizations, and arguably has. […] If you’re an artist or even just a “creator” or worker: a writer, an artist, a programmer, a cook, holy heck, even a house cleaner, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
There’s this odd tendency to be more dissatisfied with our work the better we do and then to decide not to do things because, what the heck, it will never be good enough.
The way it blights lives is … interesting. As in I’ve seen perfectionists utterly ruin themselves by doing nothing. Oh, you want to write/create/climb your work ladder? But you look at your work and you know you’re not good enough because you can see flaws, so why even try. And then you do nothing. And then … and then you’re 65 and you’ve done nothing and achieved nothing in your life, and it’s a miracle if you came close to supporting yourself. (And the only reason you’ve done so is because you did some job you considered was menial and didn’t matter, so your perfectionism didn’t infect THAT.)
If you’re a true perfectionist, you also never had any relationships. Because even though you’re far from the ideal mate, you judge every potential by tagging up defects. If you can’t have perfection, why bother.
The very smart are extremely susceptible to this, but everyone can fall into the trap. If you care or know enough about any field, the flaws in your own (and others) work will stand out glaringly and in relief and then you can’t do ANYTHING.
Of course, the more you practice and know the more flaws you see. And it eventually shuts you down. I catch myself in this trap frequently to the point of being amazed when semi-pro anthos buy my work, because I’m sure it’s the worst thing ever written. And I can shut myself down for years. (I’m not alone, I know you know other writers with this problem.)
Sarah Hoyt, “The Flaw in Flawless”, According to Hoyt, 2019-02-27.
