Forgotten Weapons
Published 30 Apr 2018The CR-21 was a private effort to create a new rifle for the South African military in the 1990s. Bullpup designs were all the rage at the time (Austria has the AUG, France had the FAMAS, the UK had the SA80, etc), and so a company called Lyttelton Engineering Works (now part of Denel Land Systems) created a bullpup conversion design for the South African R4 (Galil). It was given a very fluid, futuristic look, and equipped with a fiber optic optic without any iron sights. The action and magazines remained original R4/Galil, however.
The weapon was promoted to the South African military as an economical upgrade package for the R4 rifles already in service, but was met with little interest. Further efforts to sell the weapon to South African police and international military or security customers similarly met with no success. In total, only 200 complete rifles were made, plus parts for another 200. They achieved some notoriety in fictional media because of their looks, including use in the film District 9. As often happens, however, becoming popular in film or video games does not equate to commercial success.
Many thanks to the anonymous collector who let me take a look at this piece and bring you a video on it!
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February 17, 2023
Vektor CR21: South Africa’s Futuristic Bullpup
January 23, 2023
Five Dumb Canadian Cartoons
J.J. McCullough
Published 11 Nov 20175 dumb cartoons from Canada I remember from my childhood.
January 14, 2023
Star Megastar: Spain’s Massive 10mm Autopistol
Forgotten Weapons
Published 19 Sep 2022In the late 1980s, the Spanish gun maker Star decided to join the new hot trend of 10mm semiauto pistols. The cartridge was getting a lot of press, and Star saw this as an opportunity to ride the wave and also the get a pistol on the market that would attract IPSC competitors. Unlike some companies adapting existing .45ACP designs to 10mm, Star decided to start from scratch to build a pistol that was massive and durable; able to handle the power of the cartridge without any worries.
Star engineer Eduardo Zamacola (who had previously designed the M38/30/31 series for Star) had the first prototypes ready in 1990, in both 10mm Auto and .45 ACP. The design took cues from the Petter designs of France and SIG, with full-length internal slide rails and a removable modular fire control system. It offered 12 round capacity in .45 and 14 rounds in 10mm.
The pistol was quite massive and heavy (1.4kg / 3.1 lb), and failed to sell well from the start. The 10mm craze flared out rather quickly — it remains a niche cartridge to this day, despite periodic releases of new 10mm pistols (the SIG 320 in 10mm being the most recent). What really killed the Megastar, though, was the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban in the US. This prohibited new magazines holding more than 10 rounds, and the whole point of the bulk of the Megastar was to allow larger double-stack magazines. With those no longer available, there was really not much reason to get a Megastar instead of something like a 1911. In total, just 978 were made in 10mm and 5,424 in .45ACP, with production ending in 1995.
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January 2, 2023
How much of the media coverage of the Bosnian War was fake news?
Kate at Small Dead Animals linked to this rather disturbing collection of intelligence cables from the Canadian peacekeeping force in Bosnia to NDHQ in Ottawa during the conflict, which contradicts the media narrative of the time:
Map of deployment of National Battalions in UN Forces in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina – Early 1993 (Balkan Battlegrounds Map I)
Balkan Battlegrounds: A Military History of the Yugoslav Conflict, 1990-1995 author credit: Central Intelligence Agency.
A trove of intelligence files sent by Canadian peacekeepers expose CIA black ops, illegal weapon shipments, imported jihadist fighters, potential false flags, and stage-managed atrocities.
The established mythos of the Bosnian War is that Serb separatists, encouraged and directed by Slobodan Milošević and his acolytes in Belgrade, sought to forcibly seize Croat and Bosniak territory in service of creating an irredentist “Greater Serbia”. Every step of the way, they purged indigenous Muslims in a concerted, deliberate genocide, while refusing to engage in constructive peace talks.
This narrative was aggressively perpetuated by the mainstream media at the time, and further legitimized by the UN-created International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) once the conflict ended. It has become axiomatic and unquestionable in Western consciousness ever since, enforcing the sense that negotiation invariably amounts to appeasement, a mentality that has enabled NATO war hawks to justify multiple military interventions over subsequent years.
However, a vast trove of intelligence cables sent by Canadian peacekeeping troops in Bosnia to Ottawa’s National Defence Headquarters, first published by Canada Declassified at the start of 2022, exposes this narrative as cynical farce.
The documents offer an unparalleled, first-hand, real-time view of the war as it developed, with the prospect of peace rapidly degrading into grinding bloodshed that ultimately caused the painful death of the multi-faith, multi-ethnic Yugoslavia.
The Canadian soldiers were part of a wider UN Protection Force (UNPROFOR) dispatched to former Yugoslavia in 1992, in the vain hope tensions wouldn’t escalate to all-out-war, and an amicable settlement could be reached by all sides. They stayed until the bitter end, long past the point their mission was reduced to miserable, life-threatening failure.
The peacekeepers’ increasingly bleak analysis of the reality on the ground provides a candid perspective of the war’s history that has been largely concealed from the public. It is a story of CIA black ops, literally explosive provocations, illegal weapon shipments, imported jihadist fighters, potential false flags, and stage-managed atrocities.
Read the complete Canadian UNPROFOR cables here.
See key excerpts of the files referred to in this article here.
December 29, 2022
QotD: That foolish optimism of the early days of the internet
Thirty years ago, at the dawn of what we think of as the internet, no one imagined that this amazing new frontier in human interaction would become a tool of oppression wielded by massive corporations. In fact, it was assumed that the internet would break the grip of corporations, special interests, and even governments. People would be free of the gatekeepers who controlled public discourse.
Those we call the left were sure that the internet would help democratize American society by opening the floor to marginalized voices. The people we call the right were sure this new medium would follow the pattern of talk radio. Free of progressive control, normal people could challenge the opinions of the liberal media. The internet was going to be an open debating society that worked on democratic principles.
Thirty years on and people old enough to remember the before times think that maybe the internet was a mistake. Giving a platform to millions of talking meat sticks, banging away at their phones, has just made life noisy. Worse yet, the range of allowable opinion has become much narrower. We now live in an age of censorship that was unimaginable before the internet.
The Z Man, “Coercion and Consensus”, Taki’s Magazine, 2022-09-25.
November 7, 2022
The only way to get a Grammy Award rescinded
I don’t follow the various entertainment industry awards (Oscar, Emmy, Grammy, Tony, etc.), so I wasn’t aware that only one Grammy Award has ever been taken back since they started handing them out. Given how disturbing the career lowlights of celebrities can be, what level of horrifying behaviour or criminal action does it take to have the award rescinded? Ted Gioia has the details:
“Milli Vanilli Blame it on the Rain (12 inch single)” by acme401 is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 
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Milli Vanilli, a pop duo act from Munich, will never enter the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. They were hot back in 1990, and even won the Grammy for Best New Artist. Their debut album eventually sold ten million copies. But Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus, the two musicians who performed as Milli Vanilli, are remembered today as a scandal and blot of shame on the music business.
What terrible thing did they do to get blacklisted and cancelled? You may already know, and if not, I’ll tell you.
Milli Vanilli’s Grammy was rescinded — the first and only time that has happened in the history of the award. I note that Bill Cosby still has his eight Grammy Awards. Even after Phil Spector’s murder conviction, nobody took away his prizes and honors.
But allow me to put matters in context first.
Looking back on the music stars of that era, it would be hard to create a greater scandal than, say, Michael Jackson. He was eventually arrested and charged with child molestation. Although Jackson never got convicted, the cumulative evidence is very troubling — even so, he gets plenty of airplay nowadays and is still lauded as the King of Pop. A high-profile musical celebrating his artistry opened on Broadway earlier this year.
The songs are great. I won’t deny it.
Jackson escaped a prison sentence, but many other music stars have served time for high-profile crimes without losing their fans. When R. Kelly recently got convicted of kidnapping, sexual exploitation of a child, and racketeering, his sales soared 500% in the aftermath. I’d prefer to disagree with those glib experts who claim “all publicity is good publicity” — but it’s hard to argue with those numbers.
Just a few weeks after the Milli Vanilli scandal, Rick James was charged with kidnapping and sexual assault — and then got arrested again for similar abuses three months later while out on bail. He continued to make recordings after his release from Folsom Prison, and returned to the Billboard chart. Health problems, not James’s criminal record, finally curtailed his career. And in 2020, his estate got a big payday by selling his masters and publishing rights to the Hipgnosis Song Fund.
Other music industry legends have committed murder or manslaughter. Suge Knight won’t become eligible for parole until 2034, and Phil Spector died while incarcerated for murder in 2021. The latter was widely praised in published obituaries, and his recordings remain cherished by fans.
And now let’s turn to Milli Vanilli.
Milli Vanilli haven’t fared so well. You might even say they have been wiped out of pop music history, lingering on merely as a joke or worse. But no one got raped or murdered by their antics. They didn’t even trash their hotel rooms or get arrested buying weed.
So what did they do that led to permanent cancellation?
Their crime was posing as vocalists on their recordings, when they didn’t actually sing. When they went on the road, they lip-synced on stage. And — if I can be blunt — their greatest transgression was making the people who vote on Grammy awards look foolish.
June 12, 2022
QotD: Zima
There was, however, something perversely enticing about a drink that seemed to come from a post-apocalyptic wasteland in which color did not exist. There was an ingrained assumption that Zima must be expressly targeted at somebody, but nobody knew who that was … Zima was ridiculous … but did that actually mean it was brilliant? The only viable conclusion was “sort of”.
It’s true at first blush, but so douchey that you want it to be wrong just to spite whoever wrote it. I’ve never wanted a Zima more in my life than I did after reading that passage. But at second glance, it’s laughably false. Ask anyone who was in college in the 1990s; they’ll tell you exactly who Zima was “expressly targeted at”: Frat bros who were expecting female company. Because it was clear — no, really, it was beer(-ish) that looked like club soda — it somehow seemed like “diet beer”. Which meant your female party guests were almost guaranteed to have three or four more than they should.
In other words: Zima was the midrange panty dropper. Not as classy as white zinfandel, not as trashy as Boone’s Farm, there was no other possible reason to have it in your dorm fridge, but it somehow had plausible deniability when you offered it to her as a light refreshment. If Klosterman ever had sex at any time between January 1, 1990 and December 31, 1999, he knows this. There’s no way he doesn’t.
Severian, “A Meta-Review”, Founding Questions, 2022-02-24.
June 4, 2022
QotD: A smidgen of forgiveness for the Boomers
That has to mess with your head a bit.
In the same way, no previous generation had ever seen their youth commercialized and sold back to them in middle age, and that’s what messed with our heads. The passing fancies of those ordinary suburban kids in 1963 all involved sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. We — Gen X — wanted those things too, but since by definition nothing is lamer than your parents, we had to be all, like, you know, whatever about it.
If you can grok the concept of a 45 year old telling you — with complete, almost heartbreaking sincerity — not to trust anyone over 30, you can grok the 1990s.
If you can’t, I don’t recommend trying. It’s like an anti-koan — if you solve it, you’ll achieve a lower consciousness. But if you’re determined to experience it, get really, really, really drunk and watch Forrest Gump a few times back to back. Really experience it as a work of art … because it is. It’s meticulously constructed. Forrest Gump is a mildly retarded man who stumbles, through dumb fucking luck, into fame and fortune through every significant event of the last half century. (He even has a huge dick, although that’s a detail from the source novel that got left on the cutting room floor).
Is there any more perfect metaphor for My G-G-Generation than that?
That’s what we grew up with. That whole generation was what some wag said about George Bush the First: Born on third base, thinking he hit a triple. And, of course, by merciless application of cold logic: that was also us. The only difference was that while the Boomers were congenitally incapable of seeing it, we were congenitally incapable of getting over it. So, you know, like, whatever.
Severian, “A Meta-Review”, Founding Questions, 2022-02-24.
October 25, 2021
P90: FN’s Bullpup PDW
Forgotten Weapons
Published 2 Jul 2021http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
https://www.floatplane.com/channel/Fo…
Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.forgottenweapons.com
FN began developing the P90 in the late 1980s, actually preceding the NATO requirement that it would eventually compete for. The idea of the P90 was to develop a weapon for secondary troops to replace 9mm pistols and SMGs. There was an anticipated threat of Russian paratroops wearing armor that could defeat 9mm ball. The P90 was intended to be a light and handy weapon that was easily controllable without a tremendous about of training, and could defeat that sort of body armor.
The result was the 5.7x28mm cartridge, firing a 31 grain armor-piercing bullet at 2350 fps. This was combined with a simple blowback action and a Hall-style 50-round magazine in a fully ambidextrous, bullpup layout. The gun was introduced onto the market in 1990, and has been widely purchased by security and special operations organizations. In its original intended role for support troops, it has only been adopted by Belgium.
Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
6281 N. Oracle 36270
Tucson, AZ 85740
July 1, 2021
QotD: Life at “Flyover State” in the 1990s
“Blandly utilitarian” was about the best that one could say about the least offensive campus architecture; “brutalist monstrosities” was closer to the truth for most of it. And as with the campus, so with the town — the off-campus housing was beautiful old Victorian houses ripped up and made into “efficiency” apartments, crammed cheek by jowl with poured-concrete boxes that looked like barracks for low-ranking Party members in the Pyongyang suburbs. The public parks were nicely landscaped, but each featured some publicly-subsidized “art” that made you want to gouge your eyeballs out. Every single space had wheelchair ramps, and was festooned with enough signs to give M. Night Shyamalan wood. It was hideous.
As with the built environment, so with human behavior. Everyone on the faculty looked like a refugee from 1968, but instead of toking righteous bud, they’d been taking sriracha enemas. The shopkeepers who catered to them were seemingly locked in a contest to out-obnoxious each other over their leftwing politics, and as for the few tradesmen who provided vital services, they had the warm and welcoming vibe of a DMV supervisor. Not that I blame them for this — I ended up hanging out with a lot of those guys at a townie bar, and trust me, being called out to work at a professor’s home is exactly the kind of experience you think it is. Hurry up and fix the leaky pipe, bigot, while I lecture you about your privilege … then try to stiff you on the bill. (Same thing in reverse for the students). So they came off like cops, assuming that everyone they met was a dyed-in-the-wool asshole until proven otherwise.
Life in a college town, then, is soulless, instrumentalist, transactionalist — everything’s for sale, but everything had best be spelled out, in writing, in triplicate. Nobody’s from there, nobody stays there, so everything is always on the arm. No one and nothing is ever on the level; everyone is always looking to chisel everyone else. And, ironically, the longer someone stays there, the more likely xzhey are to push this attitude to near-platonic perfection — eggheads all believe, with all their hearts and souls, that they deserve to be at Harvard, so when Harvard doesn’t come calling, the days and months and years become an intolerable insult. How dare they expect me to live like this, in a place designed to cater to my every whim, making only 100 large per year! It’s an outrage!!
Looking back on it, I see now why I hated the 1990s so much. Eggheads are incredibly conservative about everything but their politics, but in this one case, they really were as “progressive” as they fancy themselves. Before just about anyone else, they embraced the globohomo ethos of rootless piracy. Then as now, they all claimed to hate “sportsball” (if you’ll forgive an anachronism for clarity’s sake) with the heat of a thousand suns, but they could’ve given LeBron James lessons on how to be a backstabbing, glory-hogging, money-chasing, utterly mercenary douchebag. As early as the late 1980s, they found the idea of remaining loyally in one institution, building it up as a service to the community, as laughable as modern sportsballers find sticking in one city in order to be a role model. Fuck that, give me mine!!!
Severian, “Everything Is Ugly New”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-02-15.
April 8, 2021
The Weird Years of The Simpsons (1989-1994)
J.J. McCullough
Published 2 Jan 2021The show struggled for five years to figure out what kind of show it wanted to be, and how to treat its characters. It could have been much weirder than it was.
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