Is it just my imagination, or are the weeks getting short? I’m pretty sure that some bastard stole my Saturday… not to mention a couple of my posts. And my email is still fucked (sendee, no receivee).
So to escape Teh Worries, Teh Funneez:
Good question. Let’s ask Brie Bella, twin sister of last week’s Nikki:
Now go away and let me tackle my systems issues… aaaaargh.
When talking about 1970s music, too much time is spent on the loud stuff: Zep, Foreigner, Grand Funk Railroad, and so on. Ditto all the prog-rock of the era like Pink Floyd, Genesis. Yeah, I love listening to all that; but I also like the quieter stuff — and I don’t mean the Carpenters or Abba, either.
Many of the 70s stars actually got their start in the 1960s, but it was in the following decade that they really got going.
Here’s an example: the peerless songwriter Dave Mason, formerly of 60s band Traffic, doing We Just Disagree. If you listen to this as an appetizer for the rest of this post, I think you’ll get in the proper mood.
In that vein, here’s Stephen Stills and the others doing Southern Cross, and while we’re there, let’s also consider Orleans doing Dance With Me and Exile being naughty with Kiss You All Over.
But it wasn’t all ballads like Kate Bush doing The Man With The Child In His Eyes, of course; not when David Bowie was performing songs like Lady Grinning Soul, or .
Update: I think WordPress ate half my post. Apologies, and I’ll add the rest when I can retrieve it.
If you happen to go to Wikipedia nowadays, you’re confronted with this banner:
Neutral and verified information? And yet, time and time again we’re faced with situations like this:
Since the election of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Wikipedia editors have been downplaying or removing mention of controversies from her page. This has included minimizing mention of antisemitism controversies over her comments about Israel and its supporters, excluding mention of personal scandals, and censoring details about Turkish lobbying ties. Editors have meanwhile given considerable attention to alleged mistreatment of her by others, particularly President Donald Trump who editors tied to threats Omar received.
Omar’s treatment on Wikipedia regarding antisemitism, where editors have kept such allegations out of her page’s introduction in favor of more benign descriptions of her views on Israel, stands in stark contrast to the harsher treatment of various Republican officials.
And there are more, much more examples. Even one of their founders thinks they’re full of shit.
So to the Wikipedia people who want my money: fuck you. I hope you dance the wokey-pokey.
As I’ve said in the past, here and here, Chile’s Augusto Pinochet was a conundrum. Others, it seems, are even more positive than I am:
Almost nobody is more reviled by the international intelligentsia and media than the late Augusto Pinochet, the late 20th -century Chilean dictator. He holds a prominent position in the political left’s “rogues’ gallery” comprised of those who stood in opposition to their goals.
His supposed “crimes” included conducting a military coup to illegitimately grab control of the Chilean government from a popularly elected president, rounding up and torturing huge numbers of innocent citizens (killing as many as 80,000 in the process) and corruptly stealing vast sums of money while ruling as a dictator.
But many of those claims are either false or exaggerated — most credible estimates of those killed are below 5,000 — or they must be viewed in context. More important, if we raise the examination of Pinochet from the bitter soil of leftist ressentiment to the question of human flourishing, he appears as one of recent history’s shining lights.
Read the whole thing — and my earlier posts on the topic too, if you haven’t seen them before.
I will never forget two things about my visit to Chile: the sight of old women placing flowers on the sidewalk outside Pinochet’s modest private home (now a museum) in Valparaiso, and at a formal dinner one night, one of the toasts was: “To General Augusto Pinochet, savior of Chile.”
It was delivered without irony, well received and supported by all the guests, and even more telling, it was said in English — no doubt for our benefit, and to make a point.
Interesting stuff.
Apparently, the .40 S&W cartridge is in a death spiral:
[S]ub-compact .40 S&W pistols are not very comfortable to shoot. They can generate as much as 30 percent more recoil than a 9 mm pistol, without offering that same level of increase in terminal performance. Not only are .40 S&W pistols less comfortable to shoot, they do not hold as much ammunition as a comparably sized 9 mm. The .40 S&W, which was not all that long ago the darling of law enforcement, is now falling from grace. One could argue that its time in the spotlight is over.
A substantial contribution to the .40 S&W’s decline in popularity was the announcement by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that they were returning to the 9 mm. This was shocking to folks who have followed and trusted the FBI’s work with regard to the terminal performance of handgun ammunition, especially considering that the FBI is the reason we have the .40 S&W. In case you didn’t know, after the 1986 FBI shootout in Miami, the Bureau began a search for the ultimate bullet and defensive handgun cartridge. The .40 S&W and the popular FBI guidelines for defensive handgun ammunition performance was the result of these efforts.
This is what happens when you let a government agency decide anything: you get a compromise between two options which is somehow worse than either. 9mm Europellet: marginal effectiveness but easy to shoot and lotsa boolets, as opposed to the .40 S&W: not as easy to shoot, more effective than the 9mm but fewer boolets to spray around and injure/kill innocent bystanders. (The exact same could be said for the .45 ACP, but don’t get me started.)
Simply stated: there is no magic, do-it all cartridge because of Isaac Newton and the laws of physics, and the variety of tasks the cartridge is required to fill. This is especially true of handgun cartridges because of the portability / concealability of the guns involved.
Also note that the rush to replace the 9mm Europellet was a result of a single incident — the 1986 Miami Shootout — and the knee-jerk panic that ensued among the Fibby top brass when faced with a pair of well-armed and -motivated mopes. (See also the North Hollywood Bank Shootout a decade later, where law enforcement was similarly under-armed and essentially outfought for nearly an hour by another pair of choirboys.) The Miami thing was notable for the fact that the Fibbies were using mostly handguns against rifles — never an optimal situation from a handgunner’s perspective — but instead of equipping all FBI cars with trunk guns (even M16s would have been okay), the idiots decided instead to change the handgun cartridge to a more powerful — and at the time, nonexistent — cartridge. (Couldn’t go back to the .45 ACP or .357 Mag because that would have been tantamount to admitting that they fucked up in the first place by going to the wussy Europellet so as to make their handguns more palatable to the Bureau’s Dickless Traceys a.k.a. female agents.)
Speaking personally, I can’t say I’m too sad about the .40 S&W situation because I never could shoot the stupid thing worth a damn. (At the time, I considered getting a Browning High Power in .40 S&W, but when I discovered that no matter what gun I used — Beretta 92F, Glock or Kahr — I couldn’t get all the boolets into the good part of a silhouette, I changed my mind.) I found the hard snap of the .40’s recoil less manageable than the push of the .45 ACP (the 9mm barely recoils at all by comparison).
A couple of days ago I visited a new Scheels store just down the road from the range, and out of curiosity browsed in the Ammo section. Amongst all the bare shelves, the most heavily-stocked items in the handgun section were .460 S&W (another dud) and the .40 S&W, which is I guess the only upside for you if you have a gun thus chambered.
(I also saw a gently-used Winchester 94 in .32 Win Special, and if I’d had a spare grand in my pocket, it would have come home with me. But let’s not go there.)
My suggestion to the Fibbies would be to let agents carry either .45 ACP, .357 Mag or 9mm guns, with a “minimum ammo carry” of, say, thirty rounds. I know: what if there’s another Miami shootout? Two words: trunk rifles.
Anyway, the chicks and girlymen would probably end up with 9mm pieces and two 15-round mags, while the 1911 guys would have four mags and the revolver guys five speedloaders. I doubt that the goblins would know the difference.
But that would make way too much sense for a Gummint agency which insists on caliber uniformity, for no good reason. Idiots.
Your suggestions in Comments.