John Howe is running to replace John Kline in MNCD2. Learn more here.
Here’s the site for South Washington County Citizens for Progress, and the Vote No initiative for Distict 833.
Finally, here’s the show’s music playlist for today. ♫
Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – is on the air! I will be on live from 1-3PM today!
Today on the show, I’ll be talking about the stupid debate, and the Wetterling case. Also:
Don’t forget – King Banaian is on from 9-11AM on AM1570, and Brad Carlson has “The Closer” edition of the NARN Sundays from 1-3PM.
So tune in the Northern Alliance! You have so many options:
Join us!
While the “World War 2 – Fact and Myth” series of pieces tied to anniversaries of under-covered events of the war officially ended on VJ Day, First Ringer and I both found that the crush of events around actual life led to us missing deadlines to a few stories we really, really wanted to write.
So we’ll be filling in a few in coming months, on the way to a completely different project. More on that, later.
World War 2 was not only the greatest conflagration in human history – it also led to the greatest advance in industry since the Industrial Revolution, and some of the greatest relative leaps of science, and especially technology, ever.
And leading the way, naturally, were the major powers; the elitist craftsmanship and ingenuity of the British, the innovatory engineering prowess of the Germans, and the relatively nimble manufacturing brawn of the United States.
But along the way, a few other nations contributed lesser-known, but vital, advances to techology, on both sides of the war.
There were plenty of them, of course. For all their ingenuity at building planes and tanks and submarines, the Germans never did design a workable aerial torpedo; they had to buy theirs from the Italians, and eventually pillage them from the Norwegians, who built an excellent aerial torpedo before the war:
A torpedo – a direct copy of the Norwegian “Horten” air-dropped torpedo – being loaded onto a German HE115 torpedo bomber.
And of course, the biggest, baddest example; the lowly Poles, whose intelligence service was credited since the sixties with doing the groundwork that led to the breaking of the German “Enigma” code – and, as we discovered since the Cold War, did more than that.
Here’s one of those stories.
Hit ‘Em Where They Ain’t…Yet: The fact that air power became a decisive arena of conflict surprised nobody at the beginning of the war; since the end of World War I, air power theorists like the American Colonel Jimmy Doolittle and the British Air Marshal “Boom” Trenchard, among many others, had grabbed their various nations’ high commands’ attention and held onto it during the years leading up to the war. Even the most humble, minor nations invested heavily, albeit not always wisely, in air power.
And the world’s armies and navies in turn invested heavily in the means to attempt to defend against aircraft.
The anti-aircraft gun was invented during World War I. Anti-Aircraft Artillery – henceforth “AAA” – followed two basic patterns:
Now – both of those cases assume one constant; the location of the guns that are doing the shooting, as would be the case with anti-aircraft guns on land. On land, AAA guns sit in one, known spot to do their shooting. Which makes the complex math just a little simpler.
Now – put an AAA gun on a ship, with not only it’s own speed and bearing to track, but the roll and pitch and yaw of wave action and the other forces acting on the vessel to compensate for – and the job of making a bullet or shell intersect with a plane, with its own elevation, angle, range, speed, heading and altitude – and the job just got intellectually herculean.
Think about it: try skeet-shooting at ac clay pigeon whose launcher you can’t see and whose path you don’t know in advance – from a moving vehicle.
The US created a system that addressed the first, “Heavy” shipboard AAA scenario most effectively; we deployed the “Mark 37 Fire Director”.
Mark 34 Fire Direction system concept drawing.
It linked optical sensers, and eventually radar, to an analog, electromechanical fire control computer that digested all the inputs – target elevation/bearing/altitude/heading/speed, ship speed/heading/roll/pitch/yaw, as well as temperature and humidity – and spit out the bearing and elevation for the guns, and settings for the guns’ fuses and precise firing cues for the guns, allowing the whole process to end in a plane-shattering kaboom somewhere close to the moving target.
It worked well; it’s was still in service, with updated radars and electronics, until very recently in the US Navy.
But for the problem of making light AAA – guns of 40mm or less, basically large machine guns – hit the target, the solution was more byzantine.
The first half came from Sweden. Bofors Weapon Works invented a 40mm heavy machine gun that fired two two-pound shells a second to a range of about a mile.
A 40m Bofors gun – in this case, in Finland, although interchangeable with guns that served in the US, the UK, all of their allied powers, and even Germany.
It became the iconic anti-aircraft gun of the war; it’s still in service in some parts of the world; it’s immediate descendent is still one of the most popular guns of its type. I its original, land-based form, it fired from a trailer that sat on jacks on the ground; its’ “fire control system” was a couple of optical sights and a pair of hand cranks to control vertical and horizontal training.
It’d take some work to make it a usable naval system.
It was a Dutch inventor, Walter Hazemeyer, who first developed a mounting that could fight effectively on shipboard. He fitted a gyroscope and a set of servos to a twin-gun mounting, which effected “triaxial stabilization”; the gun would automatically be kept steady against side-to-side roll, lateral pitch, and horizontal yaw. And it was revolutionary; the Hazemeyer mountings serviced on Dutch naval vessels in the years before the war, and gave a fairly excellent account (which has been largely forgotten, given the speed with which the Dutch fleet collapsed).
A Hazemeyer mounting, with an early British radar, demonstrating stabilization with a pretty fair roll.
And the timing couldn’t have been better. British ships – lacking the radar-guided heavy AAA of the American Mark 37 and a light AAA gun that had anything other than manual compensation to stabilize it – suffered terribly from close range air attack in the first year of the war. The standard British light AAA gun, the “Pom-Pom”, had been invented nearly 40 years earlier, and was showing its age. The alternative – the .50 caliber machine gun – was even worse; a lethal shredder in ground and air-to-air combat, it was useless as an anti-aircraft gun.
An octuple “pom-pom”, found on most British battleships and aircraft carriers, especially earlier in the war. The guns themselves dated from before 1910, and it was optically-trained, and threw itstwo-pound shell at relatively low velocity to a range of a little less than a mile. Still – this mounting would throw out sixteen shots a second, which was nothing to sneeze at in a torpedo bomber that was flying in a straight line at 150 knots…
In the immediate aftermath of the fall of Holland, a Dutch minesweeper, the Willem Van Der Zaan, limped into a British port with one of the few Hazemeyer mounts to survive in the European theater. British (and, shortly, American) engineers swarmed over the mounting, reverse-engineering it and getting it into mass-production in record time. The Brits teamed the gun with a “Type 282” radar – one of the first attempts at a fire control radar for light AAA.
The results were astounding. Stabilized Hazemeyer mounts were 2-3 times as effective as the British “Pom Pom”, and similarly superior to the American gun of the day. And as air threats ramped up later in the war, culminating in the Japanese Kamikaze offensive later in the war, there’s a fair case to be made that the Hazemeyer (and the improvements made on it in the US later in the war), installed in numbers that would have made pre-war naval architects blanche, along with the Mark 37 Heavy AAA controller, allowed the US and British fleets to survive.
An American quadruple 40mm mount. The product of both endless American tinkering with the original Hazemeyer concept, and of the desperate need to increase the amount of light AAA against the rapidly expanding air threat by 1944, this gun mount survived in US service well into the 1980s.
Including, I’ll add, my ex-father-in-law, who was the gun captain of what was essentially a second-generation Hazemeyer mounted-twin Bofors gun in the Pacific – a Swedish gun with Dutch fire control system and British-designed radar – and who bagged a couple of Japanese planes himself.
The National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) is stumping for the University of St. Thomas to get rid of Theresa Collett, an outspoken pro life law professor and former congressional candidate.
In case you missed that in the first paragraph; NARAL is plumping it’s well-heeled legions of social justice warriors to get rid of a a pro-life professor…
… at a Catholic University.
Remember first, last and always: conservatives think progressives are wrong; progressives think conservatives are evil.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
The Oregon college shooter left messages suggesting he would die a virgin because attractive women rejected him.
In 2014, a young man shot 14 people near UC Santa Barbara, starting with a sorority house, again because attractive women rejected him.
One of the Columbine shooters asked a girl to prom, and she rejected him.
The Aurora theater shooter’s ex-girlfriend testified why she rejected him, shortly before his rampage.
The Sandy Hook school shooter’s girlfriend fled to New Jersey just before the shooting, rejecting him.
The Charleston church shooter went over the edge when the girl he was sweet on rejected him, deciding to date a Black man instead.
It seems obvious: the problem isn’t guns, the problem is women engaging in blatant elitist, lookist and classist discrimination by rejecting ugly dweebs.
Common sense says we should require hot women to spend more time dating losers. I suggest a quota system enforced by strict penalties. I call on President Obama to enact it by Executive Order today.
joe doakes
Finally: the evening’s host, CNBC
What the conservative pundocracy says: The performance of the CNBC panel – the smirky, mugging Carl Quintanilla, the smug and snarky Becky “Not Very” Quick, and Mike “Where Have You Gone, Candy Crowley?” Harwood, with an appearance by Jim Cramer (who sounded like he’d just lost a UFC match) was a laughingstock – even when mentioned in the same breath as CNN’s loathsome performance four years ago.
What I say: The conservative pundocracy was too kind. I got the impression that the media has settled onto a “strategy” of turning debates (well, the GOP ones, anyway) into political reality shows. Part of me expected Flavor Flav or Khlamidia Khardashian to show up to ask a question [1]. It was clearly a goldmine for CNN last month – to me, it looked like CNBC wanted to make their panel the stars of the debate. Here’s hoping that the rumors of the backfire on CNN aren’t exaggerated.
Verdict: News flash: anyone who expects anything from the MSM but sniping and hackery is deluded. And you can tell Reince Preibus I said so.
[1] Khlamidia is one of the sisters – right?
Up next: Mike Huckabee.
What the conservative pundocracy says: He did well.
What I say: I didn’t see it. Granted, I missed half the debate – but my signal impression of Huckabee was his resounding rejection of…means testing.
I get it – he’s a “Southern” conservative; socially conservative, but not especially afraid of big government or spending.
It was just an odd moment at a debate for the support of a party that’s getting more hawkish on budgets and spending.
Verdict: Back to talk radio, Mike.
Up next: John Kasich.
What the conservative pundocracy says: Kasich kept himself in the running with a strong, if cranky, performance. Others point to his fairly bald-faced, McCainish up-sucking to the media.
What I say: My short list, two months ago, was Walker, Jindal, Kasich. With Walker gone and Jindal mired in the undercard and barely running a campaign, it looks like Kasich is the last man standing. He gave a strong showing last night. But am I the only one who saw his cranky demeanor and though about Jeff Dunham’s puppet-character “Walter”?
Verdict: Let’s hope he can morph into something other than the campaign’s resident senior scold.
Next up: Marco Rubio.
What the conservative pundocracy says: Rubio came back from what could have been a very tough night, and did it with style.
What I say: His take-down of the moderators’ harping on the Orlando Sun-Sentinel’s loathsome hatchet-job editoral call for his resignation (for missing about half as many votes as President Obama or Secretary of State Kerry, both of whom the Orlando SS endorsed) was sharp-eyed and surgical; his turn back to his actual policy – against the moderators’ wishes, natch – was smooth and authoritative.
Verdict: I’ve been trying to figure out who’d replace Scott Walker on my short list. Rubio might be it.
Maybe.
Up next: Ben Carson.
What the conservative pundocracy says: He held steady.
What I say: While I respect virtually everything Carson stands for (he’s pretty hopeless on the Second Amendment), I’m always amazed when I see him at debates; quiet, unprepossessing, like an amiable professor who dropped into a WWE match.
Verdict: He did well. Not much more to say.
Up next: Rand Paul
What the conservative pundocracy says: He’s a dead issue, and should start focusing on holding his Senate seat forthwith.
What I say: I’ve been a Rand Paul fan for a long time now. But I sensed that his support was similar to his father’s in Minnesota during the last convention season; a mile deep and twenty feet wide. Not to say he’s done poorly in any debate – he’s stated his case just fine. But at no point has he gotten anyone to say “he’s the man” who wasn’t saying it two years ago.
Verdict: I think the party needs Rand Paul in the race for the same reasons it needs Christie. I’m just not sure how much longer he can justify it.
Next on the agenda: Donald Trump.
What the conservative pundocracy says: He did well, repairing some previous gaffes and not harming himself – at a time when some polls show him slipping and needing to not screw up.
What I say: Major points for fixing his Mexican gaffe from the Reagan Center debate by noting that the President of Mexico was a smarter, better executive than Barack Obama -which would seem to be the truth. I think he made fewer mistakes than in the second debate.
Verdict: He didn’t hurt himself, and left himself in a good position to try to duke it out for Carson and Rubio for the lead.
Up next: Chris Christie.
What the conservative pundocracy says: Solid performance – but not enough to vault him onto the short list.
What I say: By all rights, Christie shouldn’t have gotten this far. He’s not the darling of the establishment, and conservatives fear him because he’s a “northeast” conservative; strong on business and security, adequate on entitlement and fiscal policy (and hampered by both a Democrat power stranglehold and a fairly inept New Jersey GOP), weak on civil liberties. Heck – I go back and forth on Christie.
Verdict: I think the party needs him on the short list, just to keep the short-listers on their toes.
Up next: Jeb Bush.
What the conservative pundocracy says: He’s toast.
What I say: After last night – especially his woefully ill-timed attack against Rubio – I’d be hard-pressed to disagree.
Verdict: If he’s the standard-bearer for “the Establishment”, then Karl Rove’s gonna need to get to work fast.
Up next: Carly Fiorina.
What the conservative pundocracy says: She does well in debates, but is having a hard time keeping excitement going – and last night’s performance was good enough for no more than holding steady.
What I say: Every time I see Carly Fiorina talk, I get more impressed. Trump and Carson are sucking all of the “anti-establishment” air out of the room – and it’s a shame, because I think Fiorina has the best potential as a chief executive among the three “antis” on the list (along with Trump and Carson).
Verdict: The debate didn’t give her a huge boost, but in a just world she’ll remain a contender.
As i noted earlier, I only watched perhaps 90 minutes of last night’s cage match.
I’m going to give my impressions anyway – one candidate at a time. I’m going to start with Ted Cruz.
What the conservative pundocracy says: It was the performance he needed to stay on the short list.
What I say: And how. His jeremiad against the media was a watershed, both within the debate and (I can dream), within the party; it’s restarted the discussion about getting the GOP out of the major-media “debate” / reality show racket. If he serves no other purposes in this campaign, last night’s contribution could turn out to be a fantastic thing.
Verdict: Excellent.
…of last night’s CNBC GOP debate?
“Even Brian Williams is saying he wasn’t there”
— Mark Okern (from Facebook)
I watched the first half of yesterday’s GOP debate, before I had to go do some family stuff.
There had been some hope that CNBC – an ostensible financial network – would ask some substantial questions about financial policy. And there were a few, sort of, in a way.
But “are you an evil comic book villain?”
John Harwood came across as a Liberal snidely whiplash. Becky Quick…wasn’t very. Carl Quintanilla sounded like he was hosting a cable access production of Jimmy’s First Debate. And Jim Cramer? I don’t know if he was on cold medicine or had taken a couple of shots to the head before he went on the air, but good lord, that performance will be taught in broadcast schools for decades to come as an example of how not to sound when reading off a teleprompter.
It’s entirely possible (except for Harwood) that they were just trying to come across as tough, hard-nosed “journalists” – an effect that lasts precisely until the phrase “evil comic book villain” came up.
But the hour I spent was worth it, if only for this; Ted Cruz’ jeremiad against the media was one for the ages:
Glorious.
“But he should have answered Quintanilla’s substantive question!” Er, did you catch the question? “Does your opposition to a “moderate” budget deal mean you’re unqualified?”
UPDATE: As I put this morning’s piece together in my head last night, I thought – as I often do when matters of discerning bias in others come up – “Am I right, or is this just confirmation bias?”
Well, it’s not just me; Roger Simon torched the moderators pretty ruthlessly:
The big story — the A-story — on Wednesday night — the actual full blown case of seppuku — was CNBC. The network will never seem the same. Their moderators — Becky Quick, John Harwood, and Carl Quintanilla — were so obviously biased you would have thought it was a parody, if you hadn’t known it was real, a kind of black comic nightmare out of a leftwing theatre of the absurd.
I thought that very thing as I was sitting at O’Gara’s watching the show last night; “this is like an SNL sketch”.
And there was this bit, that I didn’t catch last night; as part of the moderators’ attempt to gut-shoot Rubio, the non-Trump front-runner, John Harwood doubled down on a lie he’d already apologized for:
But more than that, the debate revealed something I had thought about before, but never seen so clearly — how bias can affect the brain, almost make it dysfunctional. I assume John Howard is an intelligent man. He writes for the New York Times. (Make of that what you will, but I did write for that newspaper myself once upon a time, so mind your manners.) Nevertheless, Harwood did something extraordinary. He lied about Rubio’s tax plan in the exact same way not once but twice — once at the debate and once about two weeks before the debate. What made it extraordinary was that Harwood had apologized for that same lie the first time on Twitter on October 14 and then lied again Wednesday night as if he didn’t remember his own apology and correction. (The Federalist has the full story with the tweet – Surprise! John Harwood Lied About Rubio’s Tax Plan…)
Simon continues – pervasive bias acts as a form of cognitive disorder, blotting out right and wrong in extreme cases.
It’ll never get in the DSMVI, but we all know it’s there.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Times change, slogans change.
A Democrat President once said “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” That’s a Republican way of thinking expressed in the idiom “pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps.”
In contrast, Bernie and Hilary believe “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” Democrats are all socialists now, a European way of thinking endorsed by Karl, Josef, Fidel and the most famous National Socialist of all, Adolf.
Cue the liberal who writes in bleating “Naziism wasn’t socialism”. Oh, go ahead. Do it. I’m ready for you. You’ll lose.
Back to Joe’s email:
I’m curious – if we were to survey history for the last few millennia, which system has been more successful at raising overall prosperity? Or is that factor no longer relevant, misery now being considered acceptable so long as it’s widely enough shared?
Joe Doakes
It’s not even a question for those paying attention.
So much of our society, of course, isn’t, and never has.
I remember back in the eighties, back when I used to occasionally frequent bars on University Avenue on the weekend, ducking into Big V’s, near Snelling. Back then – long before the Turf Club became a hangout for music hipsters – it was a place to go if you were in the mood to crowd into a long, narrow room with a cement floor and a single row of ripped naugahyde stools and listen to a band that was on the floor three feet away from you, under the watchful eye of bartenders who could rip your arms out at the shoulders, and the men who loved them.
I haven’t been there in a while – which was why it was a bit of a shock to see that they were going to start closing down early because the area is getting just too dodgy.
I got this from a regular reader of this blog:
I was at Big V’s a few weeks ago and my friends and I were talking about this very topic- is the area less safe? I was saying it felt that way to me and others agreed, but we wondered if it was because we were now older, perhaps some of us more sober, so we noticed more around us.
You may be older and more sober – but there’s more to notice.
Up by my house, half a mile north of Big V’s, we’ve had two smash-and-grab burglaries and, a few weeks back, the first daylight armed robbery I can remember in 22 years on the block.
On the Hamline/Midway neighborhood Facebook page, there is of course the usual tension; those who believe that crime is on the rise, and think that the Green Line has turned into a commuter line for criminals, those who say there’s nothing to see here, move along, citizen.
I really want to believe that, but I know the Russian Tea House owners have noticed a decrease in sense of safety and now Big V’s.
Which is a good reminder; if you’re in Saint Paul on Friday, go to Russian Tea House for lunch. You’ll thank me. Then you’ll thank me again. It’s a neighborhood treasure.
And Metro Transit’s response? The increase in the number of service calls [reported by the Saint Paul police] doesn’t mean anything. Some of those numbers include “proactive visits” to the area. Right..because the cops are always running proactively to the safe parts of the city.
Light Rail lines nationwide tend to be commuter lines for criminals. Expect the establishment in the Twin Cities to deny that has hard and often as they can.
Kevin Williamson, the most essential writer in American conservatism today, on the celebrity cult that dominates not only, well, celebrity, but increasingly public life:
As a fairly committed theater-goer, I like actors as much as the next guy, but I also endorse the traditional social ranking of them alongside prostitutes and tinkers, a few degrees inferior to mule-drivers and emancipated peasants.
Naturally, the whole thing is worth a read.
There’s an old saying, which experience as a conservative in a liberal city shows to be utterly true: “Conservatives believe Liberals are wrong; Liberals believe Conservatives are evil”.
Further evidence: Liberals are vastly more likely to unfriend social media contacts over politics than conservatives are.
I’d extend that; conservative blogs, like mine, are highly likely to tolerate dissent in our various social media feeds; check and see how much dissent the likes of “Protect MN” or Sally Jo Sorenson tolerate in their online worlds when you’ve got time for an experiment.
A very brief experiment.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Another school, another shooting, more people dead, this time in Sweden where a young man wearing a Star Wars mask attacked a school.
No, the killer didn’t do the shooting. The killer was stopped by a good guy with a gun. Who shot him. In a school.
And stopped him from killing more children. By shooting him. In a school.
So does that make this the Good Kind of School Shooting?
Joe Doakes
No. It makes it the kind of shooting you never hear about in the American media – shootings like these – that interrupt the narrative that “gun violence” is out of control.
A friend of this blog writes:
I don’t know about you, but most of the people think of the bicycle lobby as the leisure class, so it is interesting that one of them is now admitting that we lower class taxpayers are indeed building this infrastructure for the elites.
The piece, on the transportation/transit site “Streets.mn”, is by our old friend Ken “Avidor” Weiner, who since the retirement of Michele Bachmann seems to have mostly vanished from view, but for the odd warm and fuzzy from a Twin Cities media that always seems to keep its lefty “eccentrics” in its orbit.
Its premise: biking is becoming chic, and it’s up to the working-class rubes to keep up with the Joneses in Minneapolis, with their chic world-class bikeability rating, because of collective pride.
Now, don’t get me wrong; I love biking. I do a fair amount of it. And I do appreciate the taxpayers of Minneapolis, building me all those nice paths (although less so those stupid downtown lanes, squished between the parking lane and the curb, and sometimes seemingly paved with broken glass, and always a slalom looking out for doors opening and people crossing to their cars. Dumb dumb dumb).
I’m not going to quote Weiner – because I really just did explain the article; “build bike lanes because Yay Saint Paul”.
I mean, read it. Am I wrong?
There was a mass killing over the weekend in Stillwater, Oklahoma.
This was the headline in the Traverse City Record Eagle, one of the local papers – a Michigan paper:
It’s a tragedy indeed, and a crime.
But there was no gun involved. The four people were killed by an alleged drunk driver.
Remember: layers and layers of gatekeepers are what separate the credible mainstream media from mere bloggers.
UPDATE: As God is my witness, I thought there was a Traverse City, Oklahoma.
But it’s Michigan.
Tomayto, Tomahto.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Attack a pastor during Sunday worship service and get shot . . . by the pastor?
Gives new meaning to the phrase “The way to stop a Bad Man with a gun is a Good Man with a gun.”
The police are trying to decide whether to charge the pastor for violating the Gun Free Zone (Michigan law doesn’t allow guns in church).
Save a pile of lives, go to jail?
Joe Doakes
It’s one of the ugly conundra of self defense; no matter how, er, righteous the shooting, you’re only as safe as the most zealous prosecutor is in the mood to let you be.
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