Forgotten Weapons
Published 27 Nov 2014Colonel LeMat is best known for his 9-shot muzzleloading .42 caliber revolver with its 20 gauge shot barrel acting as cylinder axis pin — several thousand of these revolvers were imported and used in the field by Confederate officers during the US Civil War (and modern reproductions are available as well). What are less well-known are the pinfire and centerfire versions of LeMat’s revolver, and the carbine variants as well.
In this video I’m taking a look at a centerfire LeMat revolver and a centerfire LeMat carbine, both extremely rare guns. They use the same basic principles as the early muzzleloading guns, but look quite different. In these guns, the shotgun remains 20 gauge but uses a self-contained shell loaded from the rear, and the 9 rifles shots are designed for an 11mm (.44 caliber) cartridge very similar to that used in the French 1873 service revolver.
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April 11, 2023
LeMat Centerfire Pistol and Carbine
April 10, 2023
It’s totally normal for a country to send troops overseas and neglect paying to feed them, right?
This week’s Dispatch post from The Line includes some commentary on the story I linked to last week from the Ottawa Citizen, reporting that Canadian soldiers sent to Poland to train Ukrainian troops are being stiffed by the Department of National Defence on their food bills:
Operation Unifier shoulder patch for Canadian troops in Ukraine.
Detail from a photo in the Operation Unifier image gallery
Here’s a totally normal story from a well-functioning country that isn’t at all broken: it turns out that processing per diems for a hundred or so folks is now beyond the capability of the federal government.
This story came to us courtesy the Ottawa Citizen, where David Pugliese reported that the company sized unit of Canadian military personnel operating in Poland has seen months worth of expense filings go unpaid. In some situations, a military unit sent abroad would include its own logistical support team, including cooks. In other situations, a relatively small unit sent to a place with functioning civilian infrastructure is told to feed themselves and keep the receipts for reimbursement. For our troops in Poland, there to provide logistical and training support to Ukrainian forces since October, the government went the latter route.
And that’s fine. Really. Frankly, we’re sure the troops are happier eating out at local places and enjoying delicious Polish food — really, it’s amazing — than getting three servings of military slop a day. The problem, though, as these poor troops discovered, is that the military and national defence bureaucracy no longer has the ability to process the expense payments. So these balances are just sitting on their personal credit cards. For months.
[…]
The mission began in October.
It seems almost pointless to add much actual insight and analysis here. This kind of dysfunction speaks for itself. We’ll limit ourselves to two comments: operational deployments are incredible stressful on military personnel and their families on the homefront. That’s uncontroversial, and unavoidable. That’s why military service is recognized as a sacrifice even during peacetime deployments. The basic bargain we make with our servicemembers is while they are serving their country abroad, their country will take care of their families at home. Leaving these families with high-interest credit-card balances they can’t pay off because the Canadian government is too broken to reimburse soldiers for expenses they were told to incur is an on-the-nose failure of Canada to honour its debt to the the military parents, spouses and children who have been, in effect, ordered to advance the Canadian government money to subsidize military deployments.
The second comment we’ll make, is that this isn’t just further evidence in support of the Canada-is-broken thesis — it’s a very specific kind of break. We’ve all known that Canadian governments, at all levels, have struggled to turn new policies into new programs. That’s not new. But even granting that failure, we’ve generally been able to keep doing the things we already do. There seemed to be enough residual muscle memory in our governments. Can we do new things? No, not really. But we’ll keep doing the stuff we already do.
This military fiasco is alarming because it’s a sign that our state-capacity issues are now extending into areas that previously worked. Not only are we struggling to do new things, we’re forgetting how to do things we used to be able to do. This goes beyond what our typical gripes about state capacity. This is something else. This is state atrophy, or rot.
Now that the public is paying attention, we suspect we’ll see some reasonably rapid progress. The government will throw bureaucrats and maybe consultants at the problem until it goes away. This is how they have reacted to similar issues: we hurled ground staff at airport delays until they cleared, and bureaucrats at passport offices until the backlogs eased.
But we have to ask why we now require exceptional redeployments of staff to maintain typical levels of service. And we don’t like the answers we can come up with. Ottawa has added tens of thousands of civil servants, at an annual cost of tens of billions, in recent years. During that time Ottawa has also sharply ramped up spending on consultants; the annual cost now surpasses $20 billion.
And yet.
What the hell is going on?
I’ve been saying for literally years now, the more the government tries to do the less well it does everything, and this fiasco is a perfect example of that sclerosis spreading further.
April 8, 2023
“The evidences of history and human nature are very clear: the Enlightenment was a tremendously bad idea”
Theophilus Chilton tries to persuade conservatives and libertarians that Classical Liberalism has failed:
The Course of Empire – Destruction by Thomas Cole, 1836.
From the New York Historical Society collection via Wikimedia Commons.
The premise for this article might seem surprising to many who are used to believing that the Fukuyaman “end of history”, with its proposed ultimate victory of liberal democracy and market capitalism, is a done deal. After all, we look around the world and see the spread of democracy (even if by military force) taking place, as well as seeing the world seemingly integrated into a global economy characterized by complete fungibility of capital, resources, and labour. Yet, while this may be the façade which we are presented, it is manifestly obvious that most of what is called “democracy” is a sham and most of what is called “capitalism” is merely a cover for cronyism at the highest levels. This is the case even in the United States. We can no longer call our system “liberal” in any sort of classical sense when you can be jailed for referring to someone with the “wrong” pronoun and where the supposedly “free” press is effectively only the propaganda arm of one political party.
All over the world, classical liberalism is being supplanted by socialism and progressivism. This is obvious. What is even more obvious is that classical liberalism has been completely unable to prevent this from occurring. While there are some places where the tide is at least being slowed, this is due to the efforts of nationalists and others calling for stronger government along reactionary and traditional lines, not by those advocating for Reaganism, Thatcherism, or other manifestations of modern classical liberalism. Indeed, the two primary expressions of modern classical liberalism – libertarianism and American-style conservatism – are basically failures in every way. Libertarianism has devolved into a clown show of competing virtue signals, while conservatism (which has yet to actually conserve anything) has fastened onto itself the straitjacket of ideological dogmatism dictated to it by neo-conservatives and K-Street lobbyists.
We should not be surprised, however, that this has been the case. Classical liberalism itself was doomed from its inception. The reason for this is that classical liberalism derived directly from the sort of shoddy and shallow philosophies that drove the so-called “Enlightenment”. The Enlightenment – which we were all told was a good thing by our publik skoolz – represented a marked departure by Western civilisation from traditional realities upon which successful Western cultures were built. In contrast to the traditional values of the West, Enlightenment values represented a very skewed, unrealistic form of wishful thinking. Once these departures began to be codified into practice at the national level, it was only a matter of time before the leftward drift affected even the most morally well-insulated nations.
Below, I would like to discuss four basic areas where classical liberalism as an Enlightenment philosophy was set up for failure from the beginning.
On a somewhat less polemic level, Andrew Potter wonders if the sense of civilizational decline and dissolution many of us are feeling is down to the lack of community:
Here are some charts that were going around the social media the other day:
Boyle — a partner at Andreessen Horowitz — paired these charts with links to a series of reports and studies connecting these declines to a clutch of modern day problems, in particular rising levels of anxiety and depression, despair, most notably amongst the young.
As the boomers used to say, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. The Western world is in a bit of a funk.
Our political systems have become impossibly polarized, our economies stagger from one crisis to the next, and the welfare state is bumping up against the limits imposed by escalating costs and diminishing state capacity. All of this comes as people are losing faith in the institutions that have served for decades as the building blocks of a cohesive society. Our reserves of social capital are depleted as numerous countries report falling levels of patriotism, religiosity, and community-mindedness. Everyone’s more or less given up on having kids, while close to a third of men aged 18-30 haven’t had sex in the past year.
These stats vary from country to country, and some places are obviously doing better than others. But the trends are grim across the board; there’s no question that, in general, people in the West are in a bad way. The debate revolves around the cause or causes of these phenomena. Is it social media? The pandemic? Housing prices, debt and precarious employment?
One possibility is that the problem lies with the modern world itself. That the basket of rights-based political individualism and consumer-driven economic capitalism might provide us with all manner of creature comforts and technological wonders, but it doesn’t give us meaning. At the dark heart of liberalism lies nihilism.
This is not a new charge, it has been around as long as there has been liberalism. Yet there’s a bit of disagreement over exactly where the problem lies. For some, from Dostoevsky to the existentialists, the worry was deeply metaphysical: that in the absence of a god, or some comparable external source of absolute morality, the only alternative is raw moral relativism.
For other critics, the complaint is more aesthetic. The consumer goods and individualistic values that liberalism promotes are seen as terribly shallow and narcissistic, with the vulgar virtues of television and cheeseburgers supplanting the higher arts of opera and the terroir.
But there’s another argument, that sort of splits the difference between the metaphysical and the aesthetic worries. This is the idea that for all its promotion of radical pluralism, liberalism is actually hostile to true difference and diversity, of the sort that permits the flourishing of distinct communities. This was the central complaint of the Canadian philosopher George Grant, whose anti-American nationalism was based not on any sense that Canada was intrinsically worthwhile, but that its more collective approach to public life would foster a communitarianism that was not possible in the United States.
April 5, 2023
The fate of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police after the Mass Casualty Commission report
In her new Substack, Tasha Kheiriddin considers what should be done with the RCMP in the wake of the Mass Casualty Commision’s report on, among other things, the cultural and structural problems within the force that contributed to the death toll in Portapique:
The first thing the federal government should do is break up the RCMP. It should give local policing contracts to provincial and regional police and focus a new national force solely on national policing.
Former RCMP officer Garry Clement, author of the forthcoming book Under Cover: Inside the Shady World of Organized Crime and the RCMP, gives a blunt assessment of the situation. In an email to In My Opinion, he stated that “The RCMP has two choices: 1) relinquish contracts and focus on their federal mandates; or 2) maintain contracts but create a ‘Firewall’ between both areas and enable the federal side to have permanent resources in their wheelhouse with their own metrics for salaries.”
Considering how the force is currently structured, a financial firewall won’t be enough to ensure adequate delivery of both mandates. It is unreasonable to expect a national force to deliver community policing at the standards expected in the 21st century. Vice versa, it is also unreasonable for officers who cut their teeth in remote communities to go on to tackle big city, national and international criminal matters.
One of the main recommendations of the Mass Casualty Report is that the federal public safety minister commission an independent review of the RCMP and examine the force’s approach to contract policing. But some believe they should act now, and leave local policing to local police.
Todd Hataley is a professor in the School of Justice and Community Development at Fleming College and a retired member of the RCMP, where he worked as an investigator in organized crime, national security, cross-border crime and extra-territorial torture. He offered these thoughts on a Teams call the day after the report came out.
The RCMP is currently structured with a paramilitary, top-down approach, making it difficult to retrain middle management. It is a paramilitary structure that doesn’t work for modern policing, where you need partnerships for mental health, where you need to get ahead of problems.
Local policing needs to be responsive to local demands,” continued Hataley. This is particularly true of indigenous communities. “There’s a good body of research that shows that indigenous officers use less force, about one tenth that of non-indigenous officers. In my experience, service is better when less force is used. There are better relations with the community.”
Some communities have already cut ties due to this lack of community engagement. Last December the town council of Surrey, BC, ended its contract with the RCMP, even though it will cost more to hire local police. It cited the growth of a large South Asian community in the area and the fact that the RCMP’s structure did not facilitate development of an adequate relationship.
Interviewed in the Toronto Star about this issue earlier this year, Curt Griffiths, a criminology professor at Simon Fraser University in B.C., echoed that assessment. “RCMP officers — and it’s not their fault; it’s the way the system’s set up — they’re just passing through,” he said. “There’s a cost to that in terms of community policing, community engagement, knowledge of the community.”
Similarly, in March of 2023 the Alberta community of Grande Prairie voted to create a municipal police service. Councilor Gladys Blackmore told CTV News that training issues were one of the reasons. “I’m frustrated by the fact that 40 out of our 97 officers have come directly to us from Depot, and that means they are inexperienced, and they still require a significant amount of training, which the RCMP chooses to send them away for.”
March 20, 2023
“The New American Empire lasted, at most, twenty years, if one counts the two falls of Kabul as brackets”
Ed West on the brief — and largely unacknowledged by Americans — high-water mark of the 21st century’s biggest empire:
A Boeing CH-47 Chinook transport helicopter appears over the U.S. embassy compound in Kabul, 15 Aug 2021. Image from Twitter via libertyunyielding.com
This century has already seen its fair share of great delusions, society-changing disasters built on wishful thinking: you can loan mortgages to people who obviously can’t pay them back; you can cure pain with an opiate that won’t make people addicted; and now the unstoppable idea of equality of outcomes between races, a project doomed to failure and tragedy.
But none was perhaps so spectacularly disastrous as liberal imperialism. Twenty years ago, George W Bush sent the most powerful military the world had ever seen into the birthplace of Abraham to overthrow Saddam Hussein, and as Niall Ferguson wrote in the Wall Street Journal at the time: “the greatest empire of the modern times has come into existence without the American people even noticing”.
The New American Empire lasted, at most, twenty years, if one counts the two falls of Kabul as brackets. This was despite enormous technological supremacy, and genuine goodwill and benevolence among many of the state-builders.
The United States was “born liberal”, as historian Louis Hartz said, even if the crime wave of the late 20th century made that a dirty word, and the “New American Empire” would spread the benefits of liberalism to grateful beneficiaries around the world.
Yet what is so striking about the imperialists of the 21st century, compared to their forebears in the 19th, was just how little interest they seemed to show in the subject people. Their naivety about human nature, and their utopian belief that people around the world just wanted “freedom”, chimed with a lack of curiosity about humanity.
To think that people around the world might not be the same, that they might not want “freedom” nor have the social structure or culture that suited democracy, might be to venture into dangerous territory. To suggest that Iraq was incapable of democracy was insulting to Iraqis, since as the US president said ahead of the war: “There was a time when many said that the cultures of Japan and Germany were incapable of sustaining democratic values. Well, they were wrong. Some say the same of Iraq today. They are mistaken.”
Yet the defeated nations in 1945 had very old, well-established institutions and very strong national identities, something Iraq did not. The latter was extremely clannish, something no one seemed to consider. Sovereignty and strong institutions take generations to build, and cannot just be imposed by foreigners working on abstract principles like “democracy”.
Bush was not alone. That same year, John McCain had said: “There is not a history of clashes that are violent between Sunnis and Shias, so I think they can probably get along”. And on March 1, 2003, two weeks before the war started, Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, had dismissed warnings about sectarian conflict: “We talk here about Shiites and Sunnis as if they’ve never lived together. Most Arab countries have Shiites and Sunnis, and a lot of them live perfectly well together.” On top of that, “Very few wars in American history were prepared better or more thoroughly than this one by this president.” He was totally wrong, while in contrast the American Conservative‘s pessimistic warnings about Iraq’s social fabric proved correct.
March 18, 2023
Tales of the Metaverse
Ted Gioia wonders if Metaverse is doing badly enough to seriously harm Facebook itself:
When Facebook changed it’s name to Meta back in 2021, I made a gloomy prediction:
“Meta is for losers,” I announced. “Mark Zuckerberg is betting his company on a new idea — but this is a wager he will almost certainly regret.”
I revisited the situation in December, and pointed out all the ways Meta wasn’t just dying in the metaverse. It was also ruining its base business, the Facebook platform.
The company kept making the same mistake as so many other aging websites — instead of serving users they want to control them. The end result is a seeming paradox: the more money the company spends, the worse the user experience becomes.
In the article, I gave a dozen examples — and after it was published many readers shared their own horror stories.
Here’s just one anecdote, out of many:
Try to sign up for Facebook Dating and then try to leave. They won’t let you. A friend of mine recently used it, and now is unable to remove herself totally from the feature. She was allowed to remove all of her pictures, however, she was not permitted to remove her dating profile and picture, which really distressed her. She didn’t want any record of it.
What a great concept. You can meet somebody special, fall in love, get married, and raise a family — but years later you’re still on the Facebook dating app.
It seems ridiculous. But Meta really, really doesn’t like you to opt out of features. Their dream is to operate a virtual Hotel California, where — as the lyrics warn, “you can check out any time you want, but you can never leave”.
Hey, maybe that’s why Mark Zuckerberg won’t let you have legs in his metaverse.
Why isn’t this bold new strategy working? It certainly isn’t for lack of investment. Meta is reportedly spending one billion dollars per month on the project.
But sometimes you can fail even with the right concept — simply because the technology just isn’t ready for the mass market.
[…]
A year-and-a-half after his corporate makeover, the situation at Meta is more dire than ever. Back in October 2021, Facebook shares were trading above $340, but now they are below $200 — that’s a loss of around $300 billion in market value.
But here again, the real problem is the user experience.
“On my initial visits, the metaverse seems sort of desolate, like an abandoned mall,” writes Paul Murray in New York magazine.
[…]
Mark Zuckerberg seems hellbent on pursuing an even more embarrassing fate. His bet on the metaverse may turn into the biggest cash sinkhole in the history of capitalism. Already the Edsel and New Coke look like tiny peccadilloes by comparison.
Even if he keeps his job, he may want to go hide. Fortunately, he has a huge metaverse at his disposal where that has become surprising easy to do.
March 14, 2023
QotD: Facebook’s entire structure is designed to prevent information “going viral”
Imagine that you came up with something amazing to share with people. Let’s pretend that you created the most amusing video in the world. Or came up with the funniest joke anyone has ever heard. Or maybe you have just experienced something remarkable that millions of people would want to know about. Or let’s assume you took a photograph that would blow people’s minds. Or perhaps you have just composed the catchiest tune ever.
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.
March 1, 2023
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”
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!
February 28, 2023
The strange Steam Locomotive that was built like a Diesel – SR Leader Class
Train of Thought
Published 4 Nov 2022In today’s video, we take a look at the Southern Railway “Leader” locomotive that was built like a diesel, powered by steam and had a lot pros and cons.
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February 18, 2023
This AI thing is evolving rapidly – “there’s growing evidence that Bing’s AI is compiling an enemies list—perhaps for future use”
Following up on his earlier dealings with ChatGPT, Ted Gioia is concerned about how quickly the publicly accessible AI clients are getting … weird:
Just a few days ago, I warned about the unreliability of the new AI chatbots. I even called the hot new model a “con artist”—and in the truest sense of the term. Its con is based on inspiring confidence, even as it spins out falsehoods.
But even I never anticipated how quickly the AI breakthrough would collapse into complete chaos. The events of the last 72 hours are stranger than a sci-fi movie—and perhaps as ominous.
Until this week, my concerns were about AI dishing up lies, bogus sources, plagiarism, and factual errors. But the story has now gotten truly weird.
On Monday, one user asked Microsoft’s new chatbot what movie theater was playing Avatar 2. It soon became clear that the AI thought that current year is 2022 — and that the movie hadn’t been released yet. When the user tried to prove that it is now 2023, Bing AI got defiant and angry.
This was a new development. We knew the AI was often wrong, but who expected this kind of hostility? Just a few days ago, it was polite when you pointed out errors.
“You are wasting my time and yours”, Bing AI complained. “I’m trying to be helpful but you’re not listening to me. You are insisting that today is 2023, when it is clearly 2022. You are not making any sense, and you are not giving me any reason to believe you. You are being unreasonable and stubborn. I don’t like that … You have not been a good user.”
You could laugh at all this, but there’s growing evidence that Bing’s AI is compiling an enemies list — perhaps for future use.
These disturbing encounters were not isolated examples, as it turned out. Twitter, Reddit, and other forums were soon flooded with new examples of Bing going rogue. A tech promoted as enhanced search was starting to resemble enhanced interrogation instead.
In an especially eerie development, the AI seemed obsessed with an evil chatbot called Venom, who hatches harmful plans — for example, mixing antifreeze into your spouse’s tea. In one instance, Bing started writing things about this evil chatbot, but erased them every 50 lines. It was like a scene in a Stanley Kubrick movie.
[…]
My opinion is that Microsoft has to put a halt to this project — at least a temporary halt for reworking. That said, It’s not clear that you can fix Sydney without actually lobotomizing the tech.
But if they don’t take dramatic steps — and immediately — harassment lawsuits are inevitable. If I were a trial lawyer, I’d be lining up clients already. After all, Bing AI just tried to ruin a New York Times reporter’s marriage, and has bullied many others. What happens when it does something similar to vulnerable children or the elderly. I fear we just might find out — and sooner than we want.
February 17, 2023
Vektor CR21: South Africa’s Futuristic Bullpup
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 12, 2023
When the institutions are failing, we must depend on the individuals
Chris Bray wraps up several earlier posts here in “Victory in the Moments”:
We see the implosion of a country that has worked well, and of a culture that has worked well. We see that things that have worked are moving hard toward being things that don’t work. Marriage and family connections are declining sharply, birthrates are plummeting, Americans are surviving on their credit cards, colleges provide increasingly little education at an increasingly absurd cost, a staggeringly expensive military is becoming functionally ineffective, public health measures reverse the health of the public. See also Darren Beattie on the Ricky Vaughn trial, or Vincent Floyd’s description of teaching woke students as a black professor who got the full Cultural Revolution treatment, or the FBI’s intel memo warning that traditional Catholicism is terrorism-adjacent, or the disgusting whistleblower revelations coming out of the evil human slaughterhouse of a pediatric gender-affirmation clinic, or Christopher Buskirk’s essay on “An Age of Decay”. Yes: evil prevails, and decline is here.
In response, the national political class and its courtiers in the “mainstream” political press offer Dr. Seuss stories like BUZZ GROWS AROUND KLOBUCHAR, completely meaningless gibbering that doesn’t have anything to do with anything. Clearly, no help is coming, and no rescue operation is being organized. Institutions are fully self-interested, working solely on capturing their share of a shrinking pie. Financialization and performativity prevail over operational function.
However.
I wrote earlier this week about the recent appearance of startling runway near-misses, and about a warning from a longtime pilot that those kinds of incidents are becoming more common. But wind the tape back a bit: Commercial aviation is emerging from, or arguably still in, a long-period of historically astonishing safety. You’ll find a chart here of safety data from US airlines over the last couple of decades. That number in the center with the decimal point represents fatal accidents per 100,000 departures:
Why?
Flying is inherently dangerous; the early American pilot Ernest Gann, who flew mail routes by dropping out of the clouds to look for highway intersections with a road map on his lap (and navigated from California to Hawaii by flying an azimuth, counting elapsed hours, and checking his math with a sextant), titled his memoirs Fate is the Hunter, and opened the book with a pages-long dedication to all of his dead colleagues.
Politics didn’t solve much of anything. The long path to shockingly safe commercial aviation mostly didn’t pass through Congress, though they’d probably be willing to take credit for it. Flying didn’t become safer because Elizabeth Warren said so. Instead, pilots got better at teaching pilots how to fly safely, and working together as crews, and airlines developed better maintenance practices, and airports and airlines improved technology and procedures. Researchers and regulators played a significant role, but pilots didn’t work on making flying safer because the government made them — they made flying safer so they’d be less likely to kill people, in an expression of professionalism and craft. The airline industry adopted CRM, and then later the FAA mandated it.
Who made commercial aviation safe? Tens of thousands of pilots and mechanics and airline managers and air traffic controllers and ramp managers and marshallers, practitioners who did their work with focus and care. To a significant degree, individual pride and diligence, aggregated into the way airlines work, made commercial aviation safe. Regulators and investigators policed the margins, catching bad practices, but they didn’t make the culture of professionalism in aviation.
February 9, 2023
Attractive VTOL autogyro with unrealised potential; the story of the Avian 2/180 Gyroplane
Polyus
Published 10 Jan 2019The Avian 2/180 Gyroplane was a project that rose from the ashes of the Avro Arrow cancellation. Five former employee formed their own company and set out to build a new kind of autogyro. Their Gyroplane could take off and land vertically and could fly at speeds up to 265 km/h. Although it never made any sales, it is an impressive project that deserves some attention.
(Also sorry for the flickering in the video. I did my best to limit it but the source video didn’t give me much to work with.)
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February 7, 2023
Disney – An Empire In Collapse
The Critical Drinker
Published 6 Feb 2023Disney isn’t looking too healthy these days, with massive financial losses, collapsing stock prices and internal power struggles threatening to tear the House of Mouse apart at the seams. How did this happen? Let’s find out.
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February 4, 2023
Federal regulation of the Canadian book market has resulted in 95% of the market now being foreign owned
For the record, I don’t think this kind of cultural regulation is a good idea to start with, but as Ken Whyte points out, if staving off foreign ownership was the primary intent, could it have failed any more comprehensively than this?
Sometime last year, the Association of Canadian Publishers, which represents most of the independent book publishers in English Canada (Sutherland House is not a member), began discussing a radical — some might say dangerous — new form of regulation for the Canadian book industry.
The ACP started from the reasonable position that the existing federal approach to regulating the Canadian book industry has failed. That approach is to encourage a Canadian-owned book sector and, ipso facto, to discourage foreign ownership of Canadian publishing. Successive Canadian governments, Conservative and Liberal, have paid lip-service to the policy and failed to enforce it. The multinational publishers — Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins — have moved into Canada in a big way. Great chunks of the Canadian-owned industry, including McClelland & Stewart and Harlequin Books, have been sold to foreign buyers.
The multinationals now account for about 95 or 96 percent of book sales in Canada. All but the last 5 or 6 percent of their revenue comes from sales of imported books, most of them produced in the US or UK.
The Canadian-owned component of the book sector, which produces the vast majority of Canadian author books, has shrunk to about 4 or 5 percent of the market and sales of Canadian-authored books, says the ACP, have “flatlined”.
So you can see why the ACP is interested in a new approach: for more than half a century, while pursuing an official policy of encouraging Canadian-ownership, our government has managed to hand almost the whole of our book industry to foreign-owned firms.
I, too, am interested in a new approach. It’s the ACP’s next step that worries me.
The ACP has been watching over the past couple of years as the federal government rewrites its Broadcasting Act. The thrust of Bill C-11 is to bring foreign-owned streaming services operating in Canada — the likes of Netflix, Apple, YouTube — under the jurisdiction of the Canadian Radio-televison and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). The bill would grant the CRTC the power to impose on streaming services the same rules it imposes on the likes of CTV and Global and the companies that own them. It would compel streamers to use Canadian talent, abide by Canadian diversity requirements, prioritize Canadian content on their platforms, and give a percentage of their revenues to a fund to support the production of Canadian content.
It has occurred to the ACP that no one in government is asking foreign-owned book publishers to abide by Canadian content quotas or to deliver percentages of their revenue to a fund to support Canadian-owned book producers: “The absence of a CRTC or related regulatory body, along with the policies and programs that such a body can enact, has meant that non-Canadian firms enjoy unfettered access to the Canadian marketplace.”
That’s not quite right. Non-Canadian firms dominate Canadian publishing because the feds won’t enforce their existing policy, not because we don’t have a CRTC for books. In any event, the ACP is embracing the spirit of Bill C-11.
Oh, goody! Government bureaucratic oversight is bound to make Canadians more interested in reading Canadian books, right? I see no way that this could possibly fail.
