The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
Non sequitur – (Latin) a conclusion or statement that does not logically follow from the previous argument or statement.
See if you can spot it in the following excerpt from this Modern Farmer article, Salad, Inc.:
After an earthquake and tsunami decimated northeast Japan in 2011 — an unexpected weather incident that scientists are still struggling to understand — the Japanese government built Sanriku Fukko National Park.
Bill’s latest Afterburner.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msD3ttWco3E?rel=0]
So the lefty publication The New Republic is…having problems.
Instapundit brings us the very best take on the issue:
UPDATE: Borepatch has something relevant to say on the topic.
Here I’ll switch up just a little bit and talk about stuff other than guns. Here’s an interesting article about some REALLY heavy equipment: World’s Biggest Dump Truck Goes Electric. It’s about a new vehicle (known in the mining industry as a “Haul Truck”) with a payload of 500 metric tons. That’s 1,102,000lbs. Say it Dr. Evil style, “Over one millllllion pounds!”
But I take exception to this bit from the “World’s Biggest Dump Truck” story:
A massive vehicle that can haul loads weighing more than 500 metric tons—the equivalent of 350 VW Golfs—just hit the work site in Siberia, claiming the title of the world’s largest dump truck.
But it has another claim that makes it even more impressive: an electric drive motor. Electric-powered vehicles have been around to do heavy lifting in mines for years, but those trucks, known as trolley trucks, received their electricity from overhead power lines.
The Belarusian truck manufacturer BelAZ wanted the efficiency of the trolley trucks, but in a free-moving behemoth suitable for open pit mining.
Ah, no. Yes, in some mines overhead lines are used, but in every mine I do work at (all open-pit), the trucks are exclusively internally driven and they’re just called “haul trucks.” The biggest trucks I work around are the 360 short-ton (720,000lb) capacity Caterpillar 797, and 400 short-ton (800,000lb) capacity Liebherr T282, the first is a mechanical-drive truck with a huge diesel engine running the wheels through a 7-speed automatic transmission, but the second is a 3,700Hp diesel-electric. Big electric motors in haul trucks are not new. Not hardly.
But you don’t get how BIG these things are until you’re near one:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKpTVbQPX_E?rel=0]
Awhile back I got a headhunter call looking for someone willing to be a Liebherr field service technician for their haul trucks. I’m a bit old for that and told them so. Maybe twenty years ago, but they didn’t have the technology twenty years ago….
Via reader (and heroic comment-recoverer) John Hardin comes another example of how accurate the media is when reporting on StuffTheyKnowNothingAbout™ – in this case, guns:
Well, THAT one is “primarily plastic” because it’s an Airsoft TOY. My M&P9 has a completely steel slide and barrel, as does every other M&P model I’m aware of.
This is from a CNN story, The U.S. Army is seeking a new gun. Some excerpts:
The Beretta M9, used by the U.S. Army since 1985, is manufactured by a 500-year-old Italian company, which has a factory in Maryland. The Beretta was the “lethal weapon” in the 1987 box office hit action movie “Lethal Weapon.”
No, Sparky. Detective Martin Riggs was the “Lethal Weapon” in the action movie “Lethal Weapon.” He carried a Beretta, among other firearms. (Mel Gibson also flinched uncontrollably when he fired it, ruining some of the suspension of disbelief, though he played crazy like it was an Oscar-worthy role.)
Here’s an interesting admission, however:
Polymer pistols have become increasingly popular as lightweight and ergonomic, particularly among women, a fast-growing demographic among gun users.
A growing demographic even though, we’re told, that there is declining gun ownership! So once again we’re “informed” by the supposed Gatekeepers of Information, again exercising their role as the clergy in the Church of State.
Yawn.
Thanks, John. I’m not blogging much, but it’s still nice to get pointers to interesting stuff.
UPDATE: Fellow Tucson blogger David Hardy points out more errors.
Scott Ott, Bill Whittle and Stephen Green discuss the recent film Fury, and the Hollywood treatment of Americans at war.
Bear in mind, none of them had actually seen the film when this was made. Please watch before continuing:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEN02UrmQiE?rel=0]
I saw the film on Friday, and my favorite Merchant O’Death saw it Sunday. MO’D is a Marine from a military family, and an armor enthusiast. I asked his opinion of the Trifecta you just watched. Here’s his response:
By happenstance, my paternal grandfather was a tank commander in the 3rd Armored Division in WWII. The 3rd AD landed in France at Omaha White beach starting on June 23rd, 1944. My granddad was assigned to the 33rd Armored Regiment, one of the units that drove ashore on the 23rd. He fought through the rest of the war, being shot out of three Shermans before being assigned as (I believe) his battalion commander’s driver (in a M-5 Stuart light tank) in the last month or two of the war. His personal decorations were a Purple Heart, a Bronze Star and a Silver Star, the latter being awarded for pulling the other four crew members, who were incapacitated, out of one of the aforementioned tanks under enemy fire. He came home with all of his fingers and toes, but carrying some extra weight in the form of shrapnel in his lower extremities. There is no doubt in my military mind, that he experienced all of the brutality and horror depicted in “Fury”, and some that was not shown in the film. I guarantee that he was very familiar with the dying horses and clouds of flies during the summer of 1944 that “Gordo” talks about in the movie. That really happened. His unit liberated the Nordhausen concentration camp. He fought through the “Battle of the Bulge”. He was there for the battles of Aachen and Cologne. And when it was finally over, he came home to my grandmother. He went to work for the United States Postal Service as a letter carrier and retired as Postmaster of the city of Monterey Park, California raising three sons along the way.
I remember him sharing a few anecdotes of his time in Europe during the war. As a small child, I would listen intently to the stories. When I was older, especially after I had joined the Marine Corps, those anecdotes became very sobering. I had a hard time understanding why my granddad didn’t clank when he walked, and wondered how he could sit comfortably with balls that big. He was a soft-spoken man that looked like an old-time college professor. I never heard him swear once. I only ever saw him drunk one time. I never saw him mad or melancholy. Never once did I hear him refer to the Germans he fought against as any thing other than “the Germans”. Never heard “Nazi”, “Kraut”, “bad guys”, “the enemy” or anything similar come from him when talking about his war time experiences. Never heard him reference the SS except in a historical context. If he harbored any special enmity toward them, I never knew of it.
There is plenty of historical data pointing to acts of brutality committed by both sides during the “War in the West”, but these pale in comparison to what happened on the Eastern Front. While there are stories of something resembling chivalry between the Germans and the Western allies (Adolph Galland allowing the RAF to air drop a pair of prosthetic legs to RAF ace Douglas Bader after the latter was interred in a POW camp), quarter was neither asked nor given in the East. The Germans and Russians had a special kind of hate going on there. I think the recent “fad” of Hollywood depicting American soldiers shooting surrendering German troops or allowing German soldiers to burn to death strikes a sharp blow to the American sense of “fair play” that has been drilled into us since the end of WWII. It has been perpetuated in the myriad war movies made over a 60 year period. Were the scenes of Brad Pitt driving a fighting knife through the eye socket of a German officer and shooting a surrendering soldier in the back with a revolver brutal? Sure they were. Could they have happened in real life? Sure they could. Did they happen in real life? Probably. In the end, it was a movie. Historical fiction, not a documentary. Did these scenes offend me or make me question my own morality or shatter my noble illusion of the “greatest generation”? Nope. Would the movie have been just as effective in delivering it’s message without those scenes? Probably.
My dad, who is a combat vet, has told me on more than one occasion, that if Hollywood made a war movie that ACCURATELY depicted what war was really like, people wouldn’t go see it. A two hour movie would consist of ten minutes of sheer terror and utter confusion. The other hour and fifty minutes would be a bunch of guys wandering around, bitching incessantly, telling dirty jokes, farting, scratching, swearing, and grab-assing.
He also had this commentary on the film:
I went and saw “Fury” this evening. You were right, I wasn’t disappointed, though I must say that there were several aspects that drove me nuts. All-in-all, I really enjoyed the film. It wasn’t as violent as people had insisted it was; nothing in the movie was as disturbing as the demise of the Red Viper in GoT! Brad Pitt was very good and (much as I hate to admit it) Shia LeBeouf was exceptionally good. Since you asked, I will give you a brief run-down of my take on the movie:
Stuff I didn’t like:
* The plot in general. By April of 1945, there would be NO EXCUSE for sending a single platoon of Shermans into harm’s way, let alone without the support elements organic to an armored division: armored infantry (though there were some grunts in the beginning), artillery, reconnaissance, tank destroyers, anti-aircraft, combat engineers, maintenance, supply, medical etc. By that late date, there would have been more than enough men and material to make sending a single platoon of tanks out on the “mission” depicted in the film ludicrous at best.
* As usual, the Germans were depicted as inept, robotic entities. The gun crews manning the 7.5cm PaK 43s would not have missed those Shermans traversing open ground at such close range. The fact that they were SS troops makes it even more unlikely since even that late in the war, the SS still maintained a very high level of training and morale. The SS officers would NOT be wearing their early-war, “feldgrau” wool uniforms, complete with peaked officers caps. They would have been wearing the same stuff as everyone else, mostly a mix of uniform components. Due to the high level of Allied air activity at this point in the war (P-51s, P-47s, A-26s, B-26s, Typhoons and Tempests were roaming the countryside shooting, bombing and rocketing everything that remotely looked German, with impunity), a battalion of SS infantry and vehicles would not be moving down a country road in broad daylight, let alone singing the “Horst Wessel Leib” (at least I think that is what they were singing).
* Not too sure Fury’s crew would be that dysfunctional. Guys that would have been together that long would have had their shit wrapped a bit tighter. Also not sure that they would have been sent a newby trained as a clerk-typist as an A-driver either. We were far from being that desperate for tank crewmen that late in the war.
* The sniper at the end of the movie just would not have been there, especially wearing a face veil (which was a beautiful, technical touch by the way).
* Too many tracers! At one point I thought I was watching the opening scene to Star Wars: Episode IV……
* I didn’t see a single BAR in the movie! WTF???
Stuff I did like:
* The acting.
* The sound effects. The .50cals sounded like .50cals!
* The small arms. War Daddy had a Smith and Wesson 1917! The Germans were equipped with a believable mix of small arms. Nice to see only a few of them had Schmeissers…..
* The vehicles. Of course! The Shermans were all correct (as far as I can tell after one viewing). One M4A3E8 (Fury), one M4A1 76mm (W), and what were either two M4A3s or later production M4s, both sporting 75mm guns. The one minor issue was the use of T-84 tracks on “Fury” when they should have been T-66 or T-80 tracks. T-66 tracks are pretty scarce these days, but T-80s are pretty common. The T-84 track was used on Shermans post-war. I’ll give that one to Hollywood. The knocked out vehicles at the beginning were well done, including a PzKpfw IV aufs H or J and a Panther (could have been CG, I suppose)! Some of the vehicles in the background throughout the film include an M-4 high speed cargo tractor towing a 105mm howitzer, an M-26 “Dragon Wagon” tank recovery vehicle, several “deuce-and-a-halves”, what appears to be an honest-to-goodness Schwimmwagen, several SdKfz 251 halftracks (which could have been Czech OT-810s but as there are several original -251s in running condition I am betting hey are the real deal), and the requisite Jeep. The star of the show, as far as I am concerned, is the REAL PzKpfw Mk VI, known to one and all as the Tiger. The only running Tiger I in existence and someone finally managed to put it in a movie! That was worth the price of admission all by itself!
This is just a brief summary. There were several other, smaller items that bothered me, but I think the movie was really impressive overall. I’m sure I will go see it a couple of more times.
So, not too much outrage over the war crimes, check.
None on my part, either.
So in the UK’s Daily Mail comes a piece about a teacher. An English teacher.
Who admits that she’s illiterate.
Well, actually, she’s not. Apparently she’s just really, really badly educated and doesn’t know what the word “illiterate” means:
As a teacher with six years’ experience, you might imagine that I would have been in my element as I chatted about the eight-year-olds in my charge and offered their parents encouragement and advice.
Instead I was consumed with embarrassment. And no wonder. The father opposite me — a lawyer — was looking at me as if I was dirt under his shoe.
I had been telling him about the new drive to improve literacy standards in our school when he had interrupted me.
‘Can you repeat what you just said?’ he said. ‘I’m not sure I could possibly have heard you correctly.’
I had no idea why he was getting so agitated. To humour him, I repeated slowly: ‘I said that me and the headmistress are doing all we can to improve standards.’
I might as well have told him that we were planning to bring back the birch. Throwing his hands up in the air, he launched into a tirade that left me red hot with shame.
‘Me and the headmistress?’ he ranted. ‘Don’t you know it should be: “The headmistress and I”? How can you call yourself a teacher when your grammar is so poor?’
And a little later in the piece:
The stark truth is that most people educated in a state school in the Seventies and Eighties had little or no grounding in grammar. And many of us have become teachers. Scarred ourselves, we have passed the damage on.
I’m convinced the rot started in 1964 when Harold Wilson’s Labour government came to power and abolished the 11-plus in many areas. Parents were told this was to enable primary schools to develop a more informal, child-centred, progressive style of teaching, with the emphasis on learning by discovery.
As a teacher, I can see this is rubbish. The belief that grammar could be ignored was virtually all pervasive until 1988, when the Conservative government introduced the National Curriculum.
This observation dovetails nicely with the one made by former New York Teacher of the Year, John Taylor Gatto, when he wrote:
I lived through the great transformation which turned schools from often useful places (if never the essential ones school publicists claimed) into laboratories of state experimentation. When I began teaching in 1961, the social environment of Manhattan schools was a distant cousin of the western Pennsylvania schools I attended in the 1940s, as Darwin was a distant cousin of Malthus.
Discipline was the daily watchword on school corridors. A network of discipline referrals, graded into an elaborate catalogue of well-calibrated offenses, was etched into the classroom heart. At bottom, hard as it is to believe in today’s school climate, there was a common dedication to the intellectual part of the enterprise. I remember screaming (pompously) at an administrator who marked on my plan book that he would like to see evidence I was teaching “the whole child,” that I didn’t teach children at all, I taught the discipline of the English language! Priggish as that sounds, it reflects an attitude not uncommon among teachers who grew up in the 1940s and before. Even with much slippage in practice, Monongahela and Manhattan had a family relationship. About schooling at least. Then suddenly in 1965 everything changed.
Whatever the event is that I’m actually referring to—and its full dimensions are still only partially clear to me—it was a nationwide phenomenon simultaneously arriving in all big cities coast to coast, penetrating the hinterlands afterwards. Whatever it was, it arrived all at once, the way we see national testing and other remote-control school matters like School-to-Work legislation appear in every state today at the same time. A plan was being orchestrated, the nature of which is unmasked in the upcoming chapters.
Think of this thing for the moment as a course of discipline dictated by coaches outside the perimeter of the visible school world. It constituted psychological restructuring of the institution’s mission, but traveled under the guise of a public emergency which (the public was told) dictated increasing the intellectual content of the business! Except for its nightmare aspect, it could have been a scene from farce, a swipe directly from Orwell’s 1984 and its fictional telly announcements that the chocolate ration was being raised every time it was being lowered. This reorientation did not arise from any democratic debate, or from any public clamor for such a peculiar initiative; the public was not consulted or informed. Best of all, those engineering the makeover denied it was happening.
1964 in the UK, 1965 in the U.S. Coincidence?
But I wrote all that so I could post this, the Quote of the Day, definitely the Week, possibly the Month and contender for Quote of the Year, by our “illiterate” teacher:
Thankfully, I had the good grace to quit teaching and take a job in the media.
I can’t think of a more appropriate place for her! Can you?
Others do it so I don’t have to. The blog Watchdogs of our Freedom does one I would be proud to have written: Detroit Shoots Back: How the Motor City Took Back its Streets and Outdrew the Left. With such bon mots as:
In Godbee’s defense, his obtuseness is endemic to the entire species of new-wave police commissioners and chiefs, who, unlike cops on the beat, tend to be political appointees who rose to prominence by osculating the establishment’s fundament.
And:
Meaning no disrespect whatever to Mrs. Moorer, whose candor is refreshing, but a team player would have insisted that her son was Christmas Caroling and produced a photo of him at around age 7, hugging Santa. Some people just can’t get with the program.
And:
While leftist “experts” explained on CNN and MSNBC that Craig’s advocacy of widespread gun ownership would do nothing to curtail crime, robbery fell 37% in Detroit while businesses reported 22% fewer break-ins, and the city recorded a 30% drop in carjackings. Police also report that nonfatal shootings, aggravated assaults, and sexual assaults were all markedly reduced.
Go, read. Worth your time.
I’ve always enjoyed the film and television work of James Garner. He passed away yesterday.
Back in 2012, I posted this:
I watched an interesting interview of actor/producer James Garner from 1999 recently, and I’ve extracted three significant pieces from that interview that I wanted some feedback on. Please watch the short (2:50) video, and give me your thoughts. I’m really interested.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MruAzbUve9k?rel=0]
In the comments, TheGeekWithA.45 described it thus:
My initial thought was “cognitive dissonance”. Giving it a little more consideration, I’m going to go with “the triumph of indoctrination over reason”.
This would have made his former paymasters at the Los Angeles Times apoplectic:
But it’s absolutely bang-on-the-money accurate.