Category: Uncategorized

George wonders how things stacked up:

We saw your impressive stats on materiel in your lovefest with Michelle…Tell us please, what was the state of the American Military in 1940 compared to Germany?

German forces consisted of 3,737,000 in the Heer (army), 400,000 in the Lufwaffe, 50,000 in the Kriegsmarine and 35,000 in the Waffen SS. This represented 19.2 percent of all German males between the ages of 15 and 65 in 1939.

The US Army consisted of 174,000 enlisted men in July 1939. However, within four years, US forces had 6.6 million in the Army plus another 2 million in the Air Force. This compared well with the 6.5 million in the 1943 Heer and 1.7 million in the 1943 Luftwaffe. Also, the US Navy was quite large in 1939, far superior to the Kriegsmarine, although not being a Navy buff I don’t have the numbers to hand.

The chief German advantage in 1939 was the training of its officers. Even before its PzIIIs were online, its officers were highly trained in aggressive tactics that were still catching American troops off-guard in 1944. In addition to the strategic problem – or perhaps insanity would be a better word – of a two-front war against two larger and more powerful nations, the Germans suffered from air inferiority as well as a failure to realize that quality is not an adequate substitute for overwhelming quantity.

And on the Eastern front, Russian armor was superior to German armor for most of the war. Indeed, early German anti-tank guns were not capable of penetrating T-85 armor and although the Tiger and King Tiger are far more famous, Russian heavy tanks and tank destroyers actually possessed larger bore main armaments.

Other than the element of surprise, Germany’s chief advantage in the initial going was that Stalin had purged the Red Army of most of its officer staff. But two years of battle provided the Soviets with hard-earned experience while many good German officers died, leveling the leadership aspect and allowing the Soviet advantages of shorter supply lines, better armor and superior numbers to take effect.

Pat Buchanan writes on WND:

True, U.S. and British troops liberated France, Holland and Belgium from Nazi occupation. But before Britain declared war on Germany, France, Holland and Belgium did not need to be liberated. They were free. They were only invaded and occupied after Britain and France declared war on Germany – on behalf of Poland.

When one considers the losses suffered by Britain and France – hundreds of thousands dead, destitution, bankruptcy, the end of the empires – was World War II worth it, considering that Poland and all the other nations east of the Elbe were lost anyway?

If the objective of the West was the destruction of Nazi Germany, it was a “smashing” success. But why destroy Hitler? If to liberate Germans, it was not worth it. After all, the Germans voted Hitler in.

If it was to keep Hitler out of Western Europe, why declare war on him and draw him into Western Europe? If it was to keep Hitler out of Central and Eastern Europe, then, inevitably, Stalin would inherit Central and Eastern Europe.

Was that worth fighting a world war – with 50 million dead?

One of the things I most admire about Pat Buchanan is his ability to look beyond the superficial and ask pertinent questions about things that no one else thinks to question. There’s no doubt that he was correct about NAFTA – like many others I originally assumed it was just a free trade agreement back in the early 1990’s – and he was the first media figure to point out Europe’s demographic suicide.

It will be interesting to see if anyone manages to respond substantively to him or if we’ll just see more of the mindless “it was worth it because I can’t imagine otherwise” tripe that often passes for debate these days.

UPDATE – You can always count on this zero to try to interject his race into the discussion. “Abraham Foxman, president of the Anti-Defamation League, called Buchanan’s comments ‘immoral’ and ‘bordering on Holocaust denial’.” It’s a tossup as to who is more egregiously annoying, Abe Foxman or Arianna Huffington.

Chald the Elder suggests a TV show even I would watch:

Start off with a bunch of contestants and let the public vote each week to narrow down the field and eventually pick the crew. Show them going through training. Show the launch and their continued adventures as they hurtle through space. You think people on the Real World get up in each other’s faces? Imagine being stuck in a spaceship with seven or eight strangers for the REST of your life. We’re talking ratings gold here baby.

I don’t know about the technical considerations for building a ship that could undertake such a journey. But then again I ain’t a rocket science, I’m an ideas man. Anyway those pointy headed geeks at NASA should be able to work out all of those sort of details. That’s what we’re paying them for, right?

Genius. Pure genius. Of course, it would come at a tremendous cost to humanity when their descendants returned one hundred thousand years from now and Honoured Matres unleash their awesome sexual powers to conquer and enslave us, but in the meantime, it would make for one awesome television show.

I feel, I said, I feel a novella coming on….

DA wonders about the future:

I’m just a young lad of 28 years getting ready to venture out into society as a surgeon and my question to you is that have I come along too late? I read your blog and column religiously and am not particularly bullish when it comes to America, but how do we get back to what it once was? Is nothing short of a 2nd American Revolution the answer? Are we a nation of millions heading towards another Eurpoean Union as you suggest, or is there anyway we can become the greatest rap album of all-time? Do Americans even have the balls of brass to do something or should I just head to Switzerland and get it over with?

The best, perhaps only hope for America as an entity is probably the Free State Project. If I were on my own, I’d move to New Hampshire as a first step. Taxes are low, there’s people dedicated to trying to rescue America from itself there and it’s a nice place to live. My brother lived there for two years and he quite liked it. After establishing an American home base of sorts where you can contribute to the remote possibility of in-system change, I’d next investigate various expatriate possibilities. These largely depend upon your attachment to the trinkets of modern civilization. Switzerland and Ireland are both more economically free than the USA, but it’s very difficult to get residency in Switzerland and it may soon become part of the EU in all but name. Ireland, of course, is already owned by the EU and has been enjoying explosive growth since the 1980s, so it is much more expensive than it was. New Zealand is another option of this sort.

If you can tolerate a certain degree of lawlessness and lesser infrastructure, Mexico, Portugal (especially Madeira) and southern Italy are reasonable possibilities, along with Belize. The governments here are superficially more overbearing than in the United States, but the reality is that they don’t pay very much attention. Unlike American and German bureaucrats, who delight in throwing their weight around and controlling the behavior of the populace, a Latinate bureaucrat doesn’t care what you do, he just wants to be left alone to smoke his cigarettes and read his newspapers.

In the case of either variety, you’ll pay significantly less taxes over the course of your lifetime, although it may be difficult to find work that pays as well as it does in the United States. Language can also be a difficulty, depending on your adaptability. Some of the new EU members, such as Estonia and Hungary, are also moving towards more freedom, but the EU may prove too much weight for them. However, it’s worth noting that the Hungarian women are arguably the most beautiful in the world.

The best place to begin your research is Escape Artist, which has many articles written by expat Americans in many countries.

As far as a second (third) American revolution, I see very few signs that the populace as a whole is not content with its fate. It is fat, lazy and generally happy, and has good reason to remain so because the government has been wise enough to treat it like milk cows instead of like beef on the hoof as socialist governments usually do. Indeed, this gentle neosocialism is arguably one of the most enjoyable forms of government that history has ever seen, the problem is first that it is not freedom, second that there are growing economic signs that it cannot last long.

I generally enjoy Townhall, I do, but today I’m just staring at the screen and shaking my head. Ben Shapiro is taking the controversial position that it’s okay to get angry about young girls being murdered, while Me So is blowing kisses to the cops. John Stossel, meanwhile, dedicated his 750 words to discussing how sugar does not inspire hyperactivity while Debra Saunders demonstrates that she doesn’t know the first thing about British electoral politics.

(The point isn’t that Labour won, Debra, it’s that it lost over 60 percent of its majority and Labour’s old guard has never been particularly enthusiastic about Tony Blair. In a parliamentary system, a demonstration of weakness like this is almost always an occasion for the party leader’s rivals to make their bid for the top spot.)

I mean, it’s not like there’s anything going on across the country, with the markets poised on the brink of a serious downturn, the housing markets looking very toppy and steady interest rate raises of the sort that usually precede a recession. And then there’s the national government pushing for a political union with Mexico while installing an internal police state.

Ah well, to each his own.

Shrubbery asks a question:

How is voting not thinking? How is a restriction on voting rights different from hate crime legislation? Correct me if I’m wrong but are you not opposed to hate crime legislation?

First, let me state that confusing one thing with another unrelated thing is very common on the Internet and is a warning sign of imprecise thought. Usually it is obfuscated slightly through the use of weasel words such as “really”, “basically” or “virtually”, for example the quadrennial notion that voting for X is “really” a vote for Y when simple addition demonstrates that it is nothing of the kind.

Now to the question. It is eminently clear that voting is not thinking. One is a private mental act with no ramifications for anyone else, the other is a public act with potentially fatal ramifications for everyone else. The hate crime analogy is a particularly weak one, as a hate crime is an secondary crime added onto an ACT that is already a crime based solely on what the prosecution believes the criminal was thinking. It is pure thought crime; the crime is based solely on the perceived thoughts.

Voting restrictions such as I have defended are not based on anyone’s thoughts, they are based on the statistical probability of an individual’s actions. The individual’s thoughts are completely irrelevant, as he, (or as we’ve mostly been discussing, she), may want to vote for the socialist because a) the socialist candidate is cute, b) the socialist candidate promises a chicken in every pot, c) the socialist candidate promises a new Medicare entitlement for the children, d) the socialist candidate is a woman. It doesn’t matter, far from being any sort of thought policing measure, the thoughts are absolutely irrelevant.

Pretend we’re not talking about voting for a moment. Substitute purchasing for voting and the smallpox virus for socialism. The right to buy and sell private property is far more fundamental than the so-called “right” to vote; it can actually be found in the Constitution. And yet who would argue that anyone should be allowed to purchase the smallpox virus, much less those who have reliably demonstrated for eight decades that, if given the chance, they will purchase smallpox and distribute it to everyone at the first opportunity?

I wish that the states were still a laboratory of democracy, as I think it would be extremely informative for everyone to see what would happen in two neighboring states, one where only women were franchised and one where only men were franchised. What most people don’t realize is that historically speaking, there is an example of the latter in pre-1971 Switzerland, and as one might expect, Switzerland was significantly less centralized than any Western democracy and is still less centralized today although since 1971 it has joined the UN, modified its national constitution to grant the federal government the right to pass gun control laws, legalized abortion, is considering getting rid of the national militia that has defended it for centuries and has an elected government lobbying the people to pass a referendum approving the goverment’s decision to permanently open its borders and labor markets to the entire European Union.

This will, in all probability, kill the country’s economy, its banking system and its high standard of living. But hey, at least they’ll have the consolation of knowing their frauleins were voting.

From the back of a new paperback:

Wendy Chrenko, former high school misfit, is now an overworked graduate student, researching her dissertation on “Remnants of Matriarchy in the Ancient Sumerian Inanna Cycle.” Still smarting from the painful wounds of a long relationship that ended abruptly, Wendy is bound and determined to prove that men and women once lived together in perfect equality, even if it means volunteering for a bizarre and dangerous scientific experiment.

And here I thought that we’d reached the bottom of the barrel with romance novels in space and hot lovin’ wereseals ravishing women by the seashore. I was so wrong.

The punchline is that this book is the proud product of the publisher I was told I’d never be able to publish with due to my “vile” view of women authors and hard science fiction. Lawsy, whatever shall I do?

It has become apparent that I am going to have to reform the government of the United States. Frankly I’d rather remove one of my lungs with a ballpoint pen. Still, I’m nothing if not perfervidly public-spirited. I will not stand around like Nehru fiddling while Rome burned. Noblesse oblige, that sort of thing.

To begin, we have much too much democracy. We need to discourage people from voting. In fact, the gravest obstacle to the restoration of civilization in North America is universal suffrage. Letting everybody vote makes no sense. Obviously they are no good at it. The whole idea smacks of the fumble-witted idealism of a high-school Marxist society.

At least eighty percent of the electorate lives in blank medieval darkness regarding any matter of public policy or history. They might as well vote on the incisions needed in cardiac surgery as try to govern themselves. Poll after poll shows that even graduates of America’s pathetic Halloween universities (where the young disguised as students are hornswoggled by mountebanks disguised as professors), which means most of the universities, do not know who fought in WWI, or within a century when the Civil War took place, or who Galileo was. These are the better informed. The rest barely know what century they live in.

Unalloyed ignorance is not an obvious qualification for governing, despite all appearances.

Only two possible reasons exist for universal suffrage, both bad. The first is that if you let idiots vote, the Democrats will sometimes be elected. That is, it is a sort of affirmative action for the Democratic National Committee; this is perhaps slightly more desirable than, say, price supports for hemorrhagic tuberculosis. The only good thing that can be said about Democrats is that, when they are in power, the Republicans are not.

The second reason is that, in principle, the idiot vote will keep idiots from being maltreated by the bright. It does not, however, keep the bright from being maltreated by idiots, who are far more numerous. They run the schools, for example, which is why students often can’t read after twelve years.

OLD MAN’S WAR
by John Scalzi
Tor Books
Rating: 7 of 10

Style: 4 stars
Story: 3 stars
Characters: 2 stars
Creativity: 4 stars

Those of you who remember the Electrolite affair, wherein a small horde of science fiction and fantasy writers discovered, to their horror, that not everyone in the SFWA is in sync with their androgynous vision of humanity, may recall Mr. Scalzi as one of my foremost critics at the time. Unlike many of his socially maladjusted peers, however, Mr. Scalzi is capable of distinguishing between an opposing point of view and the individual who holds it and we engaged in a friendly post-contretemps exchange of emails in which I volunteered to review his latest novel, OLD MAN’S WAR.

Having recently re-read GLORY ROAD and HAVE SPACE SUIT WILL TRAVEL, I can state with some delight that Mr. Scalzi is as close to resurrecting Robert Heinlein as we are likely to enjoy without serious advances in the black art of necromancy. OLD MAN’S WAR is both stylistically and thematically informed by Heinlein, especially STARSHIP TROOPERS, but manages to be so without being a thinly disguised ripoff. In this book, Scalzi wisely dispenses (for the most part) with the usual authorly fixation on Making A Point, instead focusing on enthusiastically telling a military adventure tale that entertains the reader. There are one or two twists that come as a genuine surprise, and when he does mix a little sentiment into the melange, he does so rather deftly, in a manner that enhances the adventure tale instead of detracting from it.

Style: Definite points for managing to pull off the forthright Heileinesque prose, which so many have attempted and failed. Scalzi is a straightforward writer and his strength is descriptive simplicity. There are a few rough spots in the early going – for example, Scalzi is unable to resist the all-too-typical dialogue where an unbeliever lectures the crude caricature of a believer using his superior knowledge of the Bible – but he quickly settles into a groove and lets the reader relax and get carried away by the story.

Story: Space opera, to a certain extent, but good space opera. Or perhaps space infantry opera would be a better term. Scalzi wisely eschews long and boring descriptions of how every piece of technology works in favor of moving the story along. And the story is a good one, revolving around the idea that technological advances now allow old and decrepit individuals over the age of 70 to be rejuvenated, albeit at the cost of joining Earth’s galactic infantry. Given this unique blend of Golden Age feel and geriatric plot, one might call it the first “rejuvenile” novel. Nicely plotted and with plenty of action, OLD MAN’S WAR is in some ways more coherent than its classic predecessor, STARSHIP TROOPERS.

Characters:: This is probably the weakest link of the book. While Scalzi makes some effort to provide motivations for his characters, only the protagonist and, ironically, a character who knows next to nothing of herself, come across in full-color. The crude bigot who gets his, the delightful gay man, the crusty drill sergeant, the overenthusiastic fool and the sexually uninhibited beautiful women are all oft-seen staples of SF fiction and they’re simply plugged in as required here. That being said, they’re no more cardboard than one sees in most novels today and they serve their purposes well.

Creativity:: It is very hard to come up with a new spin on anything these days. Scalzi does so and he does it with that effortless ease that causes one to shake one’s head and marvel that no one had thought of it before. His plot twists are also well-conceived and based on a logical extension of the technological innovations around which he’s built his story. This isn’t the mind-blowing originality of Stross here, but in my opinion, it’s nearly as hard to come up with a genuinely new twist on a classic tale as it is to simply throw all the rules out and start from scratch.

Text Sample: Dr. Russell smiled. “Mr. Perry, when you signed up to join the army, you thought we’d make you young again, right?”

“Yes,” I said. “Everybody does. You can’t fight a war with old people, yet you recruit them. You have to have some way to make them young again.”

“How do you think we do it?” Dr. Russell asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Gene therapy. Cloned replacement parts. You’d swap out old parts somehow and put in new ones.”

“You’re half right,” Dr. Russell said. “We do use gene therapy and cloned replacements. But we don’t ‘swap out’ anything, except you.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. I felt very cold, like reality was being tugged out from under my feet.

“Your body is old, Mr. Perry. It’s old and it won’t work for much longer. There’s no point in trying to save it or upgrade it. It’s not something that gains value when it ages or has replaceable parts that keep it running like new. All a human body does when it gets older is get old. So we’re going to get rid of it. We’re getting rid of it all. The only part of you that we’re going to save is the only part of you that hasn’t decayed — your mind, your consciousness, your sense of self. “

Dr. Russell walked over to the far door, where the Colonials had exited, and rapped on it. Then he turned back to me. “Take a good look at your body, Mr. Perry,” he said. “Because you’re about to say goodbye to it. You’re going somewhere else.”

“Where am I going, Dr. Russell?” I asked. I could barely make enough spit to talk.

“You’re going here,” he said, and opened the door.

From the other side, the Colonials came back in. One of them was pushing a wheelchair with someone in it. I craned my head to take a look. And I began to shake.

It was me.

Fifty years ago.

Note: this is not part of the review, but I would be remiss if I failed to note my great personal amusement that my accusation of Mr. Scalzi’s apparent rectal fixation during the Electrolite dustup appears to have been well-founded as it is rather strongly supported by the text of this novel.

The White Buffalo casts aspersions:

Liar liar pants on fire VD!

The last time VD and I went out to a bar, I ordered a beer and got a phone call. It was two fer night, so they put two nice big glasses of Harp down in front of me. Upon finishing my quick call, I turn just as the waiter delivers two Blue Hawaiians for Vox and the whole of the bar sitting population turns and raises their eyebrows. I promtly announce loudly that those electric blue concoctions are the gayest drinks I’ve ever seen. Vox shurgs his shoulders, states simply that he can’t get them in his local bar, pushes his little umbrella aside, and takes a healthy sip.

Actually, you got one minor detail wrong, hornbrain. My electric blue beverages had swords in them, not umbrellas, and I asked the bartender if I could have little umbrellas instead. The bartender just raised his eyebrows and shook his head with a very dubious expression on his face, which made you nearly choke on your Harp.

It takes a real man to order a chick drink.

Another funny Blue Hawaiian situation was when I was in downtown Minneapolis one evening. My car was hung up in traffic when someone started pounding on the window – it was the Blue Hawaiian guy. He said “wait here a second”, ran into Jim and Billy’s place and came out a minute later with a Blue Hawaiian. I said “thank you very much” and took off with it.

The best part was taking a big sip, looking over at my dumbfounded date and saying “what?”