Armistice Day

On the eleventh hour

Of the eleventh day

Of the eleventh month

The guns fell silent

An Historic Invasion of Memes...

Great Memes of History!

Tab Clearing...

• Tribal Lore of the People of the Gun: A great list of essential reading from Gorillafritz. If you don't know where yo've come from, it's hard to figure out which way you should be going.


• A weird longing for the communist past among some Russians, and the weird love of Russia from some Americans are two things I just do not understand. The Cold War sucked.


• Bobbi fell into a burning (jalapeño) ring of fire.

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Fernandomania...

I mentioned the other day that the Yankees and Dodgers hadn't met in the Fall Classic since 1981. That year the Yankees won the first two games before a twenty-year-old rookie phenom from Mexico pitched a W in a complete game, turning the series around. 

The Dodgers won four in a row and the Series, the pitcher won the NL Rookie of the Year and the Cy Young, the first and only time a player has taken both awards in the same season.

That pitcher, Fernando Valenzuela, has left the building.

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Monday Morning Memes, Special Highbrow Edition

Has it been that long?

The World Series was between the Yankees and the Dodgers when I was 9, 10, and 13 years old. Those are formative years when it comes to remembering things, I guess. The baseball history books I read were full of storied World Series between the two teams.

It's hard to believe that this year will be their first October matchup since I was in middle school.

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Unholy Terror

Watching The Terror I’m reminded that period nautical dramas shoot a large percentage of scenes on deck or in the captain’s cabin, which gives 19th century seafaring an unrealistically light and airy vibe.

That, and they haven’t figured out how to broadcast smell.

Something like seventy dudes crammed into a 100’ long ship… It must have smelled unholy belowdecks, especially with those retrofitted steam engines. Like the locker room in a burning slaughterhouse.

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Torn...

Some dude has put together a book of a bunch of Army uniform photos from Natick Soldier Systems Center dating from the early Seventies to about the Gulf War, and the nerd in me wants to buy it, but I'm not sure I want to buy it this badly...

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Tab Clearing...

• Why is it so hard to produce good infantry?


• Afghan man arrested in Oklahoma, said to be plotting ISIS-inspired attacks on Nov. 5th.


• Why was Roman infantry weaponry so weird relative to other Mediterranean nations?

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Great Moments in Bad Ideas

On this day in 1995, Robert Overacker rode a jet ski off the brink of Niagara Falls and into history...and eternity.

That time we almost got blowed up...

A number of y'all are probably familiar with the time a Soviet Colonel saved the world from nuclear war by staying calm and listening to his gut instincts.

Even if you are, though, this is an excellent deep dive into the background, the details, and the aftermath of that fateful day.

(If you want to read a book about Able Archer 83, this is a good one, with lots of scans of original declassified documents.)

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THIS! AIN'T! SPARTA!

Indiana National Guard troops are heading out for a deployment to Kuwait in support of Operation Spartan Shield, described in press release boilerplate as "the United States' operation to strengthen defense relationships and build partner capacity through leader engagements, multinational exercises and response planning."

I dunno about you, but I've kinda come down with a case of Sparta Burnout. They had really good PR, not only in some surviving ancient histories, but in modern tongue baths from sources as diverse as Steven Pressfield and Frank Miller.

Don't get me wrong, Gates of Fire and 300 are great entertainment, but they are anything but historically accurate. The reputation of Spartan military prowess is vastly inflated by Laconaboos.

This piece by historian Bret Devereaux is worth the read...

To start with, the Spartan reputation for military excellence turns out to be, on closer inspection, mostly a mirage. Despite Sparta’s reputation for superior fighting, Spartan armies were as likely to lose battles as to win them, especially against peer opponents such as other Greek city-states. Sparta defeated Athens in the Peloponnesian War—but only by accepting Persian money to do it, reopening the door to Persian influence in the Aegean, which Greek victories at Plataea and Salamis nearly a century early had closed. Famous Spartan victories at Plataea and Mantinea were matched by consequential defeats at Pylos, Arginusae, and ultimately Leuctra. That last defeat at Leuctra, delivered by Thebes a mere 33 years after Sparta’s triumph over Athens, broke the back of Spartan power permanently, reducing Sparta to the status of a second-class power from which it never recovered.

Sparta was one of the largest Greek city-states in the classical period, yet it struggled to achieve meaningful political objectives; the result of Spartan arms abroad was mostly failure. Sparta was particularly poor at logistics; while Athens could maintain armies across the Eastern Mediterranean, Sparta repeatedly struggled to keep an army in the field even within Greece. Indeed, Sparta spent the entirety of the initial phase of the Peloponnesian War, the Archidamian War (431-421 B.C.), failing to solve the basic logistical problem of operating long term in Attica, less than 150 miles overland from Sparta and just a few days on foot from the nearest friendly major port and market, Corinth.

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Tab Clearing...

• Chris Arnade walks the Faroe Islands.


• The Throwing Madonna.


• A Rape in Cyberspace.

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Haven't we seen this movie?

Interesting choice of words for its headline from The Economist, there. I'd say this is pretty well-charted territory, actually.

The elections in the two states in the former East Germany were being closely watched in Berlin as a measure of the rising strength of extremist parties, left and right, as well as of the weakening position of the centrist parties that make up the current federal coalition. It was the first time since the Nazi era that a far-right party had won a state election.

The returns were seen as a worrying indicator of the health and future of German democracy, and they were likely to intensify a quandary over whether and how mainstream parties can isolate extremists and keep them from entering government.

Well...

55 years ago today...

This was The Onion's finest hour.

Happy Independence Day!

"I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more." -John Adams, in a letter to Abigail, 1776

Plane Size

Wow, this photo really gives a good perspective of the relative sizes of these things.

Looks like a Douglas B-18, Boeing B-17 and B-29, and an early Convair B-36.

The maximum takeoff weight of the B-18 Bolo was 27,673 pounds, while a late model B-36J Peacemaker, with its six Wasp Major radials augmented by four GE J47 turbojets, could get off the ground at 410,000 pounds. The bomb load of that B-36J equalled the gross takeoff weight of 3.1 whole B-18s, or a B-17 and a half.

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Summer Summer Summer

The solstice is today, the longest day of the year. It's the official start of summer and, thanks to the vagaries of celestial mechanics, it's occurring earlier in the year than it has since 1796.

The last time the summer solstice was this early, there were only sixteen states, George Washington was president, and Napoleon was running roughshod over Italy.

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Tab Clearing...

• A look at the retro-styled Heritage Roscoe, to tide you over until the next issue of RECOIL: Concealment hits newsstands this month with my feature-length review.


• The Day the US Conquered the British Empire: June 6th, 1944


• Tightening Your Accuracy and Performance Standards

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