A True Dive-Bomber

Thursday, December 8th, 2011

The iconic German Stuka, with its wailing “Jericho trumpet” siren, was a true dive-bomber:

Flying at 4,600 m (15,000 ft), the pilot located his target through a bombsight window in the cockpit floor. The pilot moved the dive lever to the rear, limiting the “throw” of the control column. The dive brakes were activated automatically, the pilot set the trim tabs, retarded his throttle and closed the coolant flaps.

The aircraft then rolled 180°, automatically nosing the aircraft into a dive. Red tabs protruded from the upper surfaces of the wing as a visual indicator to the pilot that, in case of a g-induced black-out, the automatic dive recovery system would be activated. The Stuka dived at a 60-90° angle, holding a constant speed of 500–600 km/h (350-370 mph) due to dive-brake deployment, which increased the accuracy of the Ju 87′s aim.

When the aircraft was reasonably close to the target, a light on the contact altimeter came on to indicate the bomb-release point, usually at a minimum height of 450 m (1,500 ft). The pilot released the bomb and initiated the automatic pull-out mechanism by depressing a knob on the control column. An elongated U-shaped crutch located under the fuselage swung the bomb out of the way of the propeller, and the aircraft automatically began a 6 g pullout. Once the nose was above the horizon, dive brakes were retracted, the throttle was opened, and the propeller was set to climb. The pilot regained control and resumed normal flight. The coolant flaps had to be reopened quickly to prevent overheating.

Physical stress on the crew was severe. Human beings subjected to more than 5 g forces in a seated position will suffer vision impairment in the form of a grey veil known to Stuka pilots as “seeing stars”. They lose vision while remaining conscious; after five seconds, they black out. The Ju 87 pilots experienced the visual impairments most during “pull-up” from a dive.

Eric “Winkle” Brown, a British test pilot from the Royal Navy, and General Officer Commanding “Captured Enemy Aircraft Flight” section, tested the Ju 87 at RAE Farnborough. He remarked:

I had a high opinion of the Stuka because I had flown a lot of dive-bombers and it’s the only one that you can dive truly vertically. Sometimes with the dive-bombers, pilots claim that they did a vertical dive. What a load of rubbish. The maximum dive is usually in the order of 60 degrees. In a dive when flying the Stuka, because it’s all automatic, you are really flying vertically. You feel that you are over the top and feel you are going that a way! The Vengeance and Dauntless were both very good but could dive no more than 60 or 70 degrees. The Stuka was in a class of its own.

I can see why not every air force went with this idea.

Posted in War, Weapons | 1 Comment »

Tojo’s Death

Wednesday, December 7th, 2011

After Japan’s unconditional surrender in 1945, it was time for Tojo’s death:

Soon, Tojo’s home in Setagaya was besieged with newsmen and photographers. Inside, a doctor named Suzuki had marked Tojo’s chest with charcoal to indicate the location of his heart. When American military police surrounded the house on 8 September 1945, they heard a muffled shot from inside. Major Paul Kraus and a group of military police burst in, followed by George Jones, a reporter for The New York Times. Tojo had shot himself in the chest with a pistol, but despite shooting directly through the mark, the bullets missed his heart and penetrated his stomach. Now disarmed and with blood gushing out of his chest, Tojo began to talk, and two Japanese reporters recorded his words. “I am very sorry it is taking me so long to die,” he murmured. “The Greater East Asia War was justified and righteous. I am very sorry for the nation and all the races of the Greater Asiatic powers. I wait for the righteous judgment of history. I wished to commit suicide but sometimes that fails.”

He was arrested and underwent emergency surgery in a U.S. Army hospital. After recovering from his injuries, Tojo was moved to Sugamo Prison. While there he received a new set of dentures made by an American dentist. Secretly the phrase Remember Pearl Harbor had been drilled into the teeth in Morse code.

He was tried by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East for war crimes and found guilty of [waging aggressive war and ordering inhumane treatment of POWs].

Hideki Tojo accepted full responsibility in the end for his actions during the war, stating:

It is natural that I should bear entire responsibility for the war in general, and, needless to say, I am prepared to do so. Consequently, now that the war has been lost, it is presumably necessary that I be judged so that the circumstances of the time can be clarified and the future peace of the world be assured. Therefore, with respect to my trial, it is my intention to speak frankly, according to my recollection, even though when the vanquished stands before the victor, who has over him the power of life and death, he may be apt to toady and flatter. I mean to pay considerable attention to this in my actions, and say to the end that what is true is true and what is false is false. To shade one’s words in flattery to the point of untruthfulness would falsify the trial and do incalculable harm to the nation, and great care must be taken to avoid this.

He was sentenced to death on 12 November 1948 and executed by hanging on 23 December 1948. In his final statements, he apologized for the atrocities committed by the Japanese military and urged the American military to show compassion toward the Japanese people, who had suffered devastating air attacks and the two atomic bombings.

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The Japanese War

Wednesday, December 7th, 2011

I’ve discussed Pearl Harbor and Japan’s role in WWII a number of times before today:

Posted in War | No Comments »

Craig Shirley on How Pearl Harbor and December 1941 Made America a Global Power

Wednesday, December 7th, 2011

Nick Gillespie of Reason interviews Craig Shirley on how Pearl Harbor and December 1941 made America a global power:

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Marines defending Patrol Base Georgetown

Wednesday, December 7th, 2011

This video of Marines defending Patrol Base Georgetown, in Kajaki, Afghanistan, is making the rounds.

The Marines wake up to find themselves under direct fire from “snipers” and indirect fire (“IDF”) from 30-mm grenade launchers (“thirty mike-mike”). It looks like one or two Marines end up wounded from the grenades.

In return, they fire off almost all of their ammo at targets that are, as far as I can tell from the video, invisible. I’m not sure what off-hand double-taps from an M4 carbine are going to do at that range, but the rocket-launcher certainly looks effective.

As usual, the primary challenge seems to be spotting the enemy, and the secondary challenge is hitting the enemy — which is much easier with a grenade-launcher than with a bullet.

Posted in War, Weapons | No Comments »

Did FDR Provoke Pearl Harbor?

Wednesday, December 7th, 2011

Did FDR provoke Pearl Harbor? Pat Buchanan thinks so, and he cites George Nash’s new book, Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover’s History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath:

Consider Japan’s situation in the summer of 1941. Bogged down in a four year war in China she could neither win nor end, having moved into French Indochina, Japan saw herself as near the end of her tether.

Inside the government was a powerful faction led by Prime Minister Prince Fumimaro Konoye that desperately did not want a war with the United States.

The “pro-Anglo-Saxon” camp included the navy, whose officers had fought alongside the U.S. and Royal navies in World War I, while the war party was centered on the army, Gen. Hideki Tojo and Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka, a bitter anti-American.

On July 18, 1941, Konoye ousted Matsuoka, replacing him with the “pro-Anglo-Saxon” Adm. Teijiro Toyoda.

The U.S. response: On July 25, we froze all Japanese assets in the United States, ending all exports and imports, and denying Japan the oil upon which the nation and empire depended.

Stunned, Konoye still pursued his peace policy by winning secret support from the navy and army to meet FDR on the U.S. side of the Pacific to hear and respond to U.S. demands.

U.S. Ambassador Joseph Grew implored Washington not to ignore Konoye’s offer, that the prince had convinced him an agreement could be reached on Japanese withdrawal from Indochina and South and Central China. Out of fear of Mao’s armies and Stalin’s Russia, Tokyo wanted to hold a buffer in North China.

On Aug. 28, Japan’s ambassador in Washington presented FDR a personal letter from Konoye imploring him to meet.

Tokyo begged us to keep Konoye’s offer secret, as the revelation of a Japanese prime minister’s offering to cross the Pacific to talk to an American president could imperil his government.

On Sept. 3, the Konoye letter was leaked to the Herald-Tribune.

On Sept. 6, Konoye met again at a three-hour dinner with Grew to tell him Japan now agreed with the four principles the Americans were demanding as the basis for peace. No response.

On Sept. 29, Grew sent what Hoover describes as a “prayer” to the president not to let this chance for peace pass by.

On Sept. 30, Grew wrote Washington, “Konoye’s warship is ready waiting to take him to Honolulu, Alaska or anyplace designated by the president.”

No response. On Oct. 16, Konoye’s cabinet fell.

In November, the U.S. intercepted two new offers from Tokyo: a Plan A for an end to the China war and occupation of Indochina and, if that were rejected, a Plan B, a modus vivendi where neither side would make any new move. When presented, these, too, were rejected out of hand.

At a Nov. 25 meeting of FDR’s war council, Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s notes speak of the prevailing consensus: “The question was how we should maneuver them (the Japanese) into … firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.”

“We can wipe the Japanese off the map in three months,” wrote Navy Secretary Frank Knox.

As Grew had predicted, Japan, a “hara-kiri nation,” proved more likely to fling herself into national suicide for honor than to allow herself to be humiliated.

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Aristocracy and Capitalism

Tuesday, December 6th, 2011

Isn’t there a fundamental incompatibility between an aristocratic hierarchical society and one based on capitalism?, a London vicar asks Alexander Boot — who gives his paleo-conservative reply:

There is an incompatibility, but I don’t think it’s either fundamental or unsolvable. Capitalist economy definitely abhors a rigid, or even rigid-ish, social structure, while an aristocratic society thrives on it. The answer lies first in the relative weight of the economy in the life of society and, second, the amount of elasticity in the hierarchy.

When the economy becomes the be-all and end-all of society, it comes with an awful price tag — and, as we are witnessing now, the price will be ultimately exacted on the economy itself. A society defined by consumption is indeed consumptive. That sitiuation didn’t exist in Britain during her most economically dynamic century, the 19th. And, as this reader knows better than I do, the main reason is simple: Jesus Christ hadn’t yet become a superstar. Christianity, as long as it keeps not just its form but also its content, puts brakes on economic totalitarianism by communicating in no uncertain terms that, though money may be important, it can’t be all-important. Though our life on earth is significant in itself, it’s also preparation for life in heaven. In that sense, our workaday lives should imitate the perfect balance between the transient and transcendent one finds in the person of Jesus Christ. Unlike materialists, we don’t think of life strictly in economic terms. Unlike Bhuddists, we don’t neglect the physical world. And unlike gnostics of all shades, we don’t think the outside world is evil.

England struck the balance in the 19th century, proving that an aristocratic society ruled by law can accommodate aggressive capitalism — partly because such a society, unlike out-and-out democracies, isn’t an ideological contrivance. It developed organically over 1,500 years or longer. With England (or other monarchies of old standing) one can’t pinpoint the founding of her state to any date or event. We all know exactly when Germany, Soviet Russia, Israel or the USA came into existence. With England, we don’t. That’s why the argument put forth by both Burke and de Maistre rings true: as the origins of an organic state disappear into the haze of the past, we might as well accept its divine descent.

One immediate spiritual and social effect of Christianity was the internalisation of man, the privatisation of the spirit. From that followed a man’s shift from the public square into his own house or chapel. Such a man lost the all-abiding interest in politics demanded by the Hellenic world — and now mandated by our democracies. Mediaeval Christians were happy to focus on their God and their family, letting the bellicose paladins boss things in the capital. The princes, in their turn, left the people pretty much alone — they were neither able nor willing to interfere with the familial organisation around which people’s lives revolved: guild, parish, village commune, township and of course what we now call extended family. Thus aristocracy, and by inference small government, is the most natural form of government in the West (a term I use interchangeably with Christendom in any other than the purely geographic sense).

For as long as the initial pulse shot into our body politic by Christianity didn’t attenuate, aristocratic society could handle capitalism with few problems. The society was not only hierarchical, but also mobile — witness the fact that only about 1% of British peerages predate the 19th century. Once that pulse died away, the square peg of the economy had to be jammed into the round hole left by Christianity. That was never going to succeed, and it hasn’t. What this proves, I think, is that there is no contradiction between the aristocratic society of Christendom and capitalism. There is, however, a glaring one between the democratic contrivances of modernity and Godless capitalism. Sooner or later, the resulting spiritual deficit will not only destroy our culture, family and social dynamics, but it’ll have exactly the same effect on the economy. As Aristotle put it, a society that pursues wealth rather than virtue will end up using this wealth against itself.

Posted in Policy | 3 Comments »

Escape from the Perseus

Tuesday, December 6th, 2011

Seventy years ago, off the Greek island of Kefalonia, the British submarine HMS Perseus hit an Italian mine, and one survivor, John Capes, made an incredible escape:

The engine room door was forced shut by the pressure of water on the other side. “It was creaking under the great pressure. Jets and trickles from the rubber joint were seeping through,” said Capes.

He dragged any stokers who showed signs of life towards the escape hatch and fitted them and himself with Davis Submarine Escape Apparatus, a rubber lung with an oxygen bottle, mouthpiece and goggles.

This equipment had only been tested to a depth of 100ft (30m). The depth gauge showed just over 270ft, and as far as Capes knew, no-one had ever made an escape from such a depth.

In fact the gauge was broken, over-estimating the depth by 100ft, but time was running out. It was difficult to breathe now.

He flooded the compartment, lowered the canvas trunk beneath the escape hatch and with great difficulty released the damaged bolts on the hatch.

He pushed his injured companions into the trunk, up through the hatch and away into the cold sea above. Then he took a last swig of rum from his blitz bottle, ducked under and passed through the hatch himself.

“I let go, and the buoyant oxygen lifted me quickly upward. Suddenly I was alone in the middle of the great ocean.

“The pain became frantic, my lungs and whole body as fit to burst apart. Agony made me dizzy. How long can I last?

“Then, with the suddenness of certainty, I burst to the surface and wallowed in a slight swell with whitecaps here and there.”

But having made the deepest escape yet recorded, his ordeal was not over.

His fellow injured stokers had not made it to the surface with him so he found himself alone in the middle of a cold December sea.

In the darkness he spotted a band of white cliffs and realised he had no choice but to strike out for those.

For the next year and a half, local families hid him from the Italian occupiers.

His story seemed fantastic, but in 1997 diver Kostas Thoctarides found the Perseus — and in it Capes’s empty torpedo-tube bunk, the hatch he’d opened, and the blitz bottle he’d drunk out of.

The Diver magazine story includes this passage that seems too WWII-era British to be true:

Using all my weight, I put my remaining strength on the tommy bar in the tube spanner to undo the dog nuts.

Posted in War | 1 Comment »

Minimum Cache

Tuesday, December 6th, 2011

The folks at Cheaper than Dirt sell guns and ammo, so their minimum cache of what you should have in your gun locker might qualify as not-so-minimal, but it’s a solid list to send to Santa:

  1. Glock 19, compact 9 mm pistol
  2. Remington 870 or Mossberg 500, 12-gauge shotgun
  3. Ruger 10/22, .22 LR semi-auto rifle
  4. AR-15, 5.56 mm semi-auto rifle

Posted in Weapons | 8 Comments »

Who’ll make the world free from democracy?

Monday, December 5th, 2011

Max Boot is a well-known neo-conservative. Alexander Boot, his father, is much more of a paleo-conservative. Who’ll make the world free from democracy?, he asks:

The systematic effort to unseat relatively secular, if undoubtedly unsavoury, regimes because they lack universal suffrage can only charitably be described as harebrained. Americans in general, and the neocons in particular, fail to notice that all those Shahs tend to be replaced by Khomeinis, not James Madisons. The natural successor to Mubarak will resemble Osama more than Obama.

(Hat tip to Samuel Lenser.)

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Dwarf Wheat

Monday, December 5th, 2011

One of the most important developments of the last century is Norman Borlaug’s development of dwarf wheat:

Dwarfing is an important agronomic quality for wheat; dwarf plants produce thick stems. The cultivars Borlaug worked with had tall, thin stalks. Taller wheat grasses better compete for sunlight, but tend to collapse under the weight of the extra grain — a trait called lodging —  from the rapid growth spurts induced by nitrogen fertilizer Borlaug used in the poor soil. To prevent this, he bred wheat to favor shorter, stronger stalks that could better support larger seed heads.

In 1953, he acquired a Japanese dwarf variety of wheat called Norin 10 developed by Orville Vogel, that had been crossed with a high-yielding American cultivar called Brevor 14. Norin 10/Brevor is semi-dwarf (one-half to two-thirds the height of standard varieties) and produces more stalks and thus more heads of grain per plant. Also, larger amounts of assimilate were partitioned into the actual grains, further increasing the yield. Borlaug crossbred the semi-dwarf Norin 10/Brevor cultivar with his disease-resistant cultivars to produce wheat varieties that were adapted to tropical and sub-tropical climates.

Borlaug’s new semi-dwarf, disease-resistant varieties, called Pitic 62 and Penjamo 62, changed the potential yield of spring wheat dramatically. By 1963, 95% of Mexico’s wheat crops used the semi-dwarf varieties developed by Borlaug. That year, the harvest was six times larger than in 1944, the year Borlaug arrived in Mexico. Mexico had become fully self-sufficient in wheat production, and a net exporter of wheat. Four other high yield varieties were also released, in 1964: Lerma Rojo 64, Siete Cerros, Sonora 64, and Super X.

Dwarf wheat may — or may not — play a role in the increase in celiac disease over the past 50 years.

Posted in Science | 1 Comment »

Project Orion

Monday, December 5th, 2011

Project Orion seems like the kind of project Nazi rocket-scientists would have dreamed up — a rocket propelled by intermittent nuclear bomb explosions — but the general proposal came from Stanislaw Ulam, a Polish Jew who had come to the States before his homeland was invaded, and the preliminary calculations were made by Frederick Reines, the son of Russian Jews who had come to the States a generation earlier:

During the war, Ulam and Frederick Reines considered nuclear propulsion of aircraft and rockets. This is an attractive possibility, because the nuclear energy per unit mass of fuel is a million times greater than that available from chemicals. From 1955 to 1972, some of their ideas were pursued during Project Rover, which explored the use of nuclear reactors to power rockets.
[...]
In 1955, Ulam and C. J. Everett proposed, in contrast to Rover’s continuous heating of rocket exhaust, to harness small nuclear explosions for propulsion. Project Orion was a study of this idea. It began in 1958 and ended in 1965, after the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 banned nuclear weapons tests in the atmosphere and in space. Work on this project was spearheaded by physicist Freeman Dyson, who commented on the decision to end Orion in a famous article, “Death of a Project“.

Orion offered high thrust and high specific impulse, or propellant efficiency, at the same time. Traditional chemical rockets produce high thrust, but produce it inefficiently, and electric ion engines efficiently produce small thrust.

The key to the design is the elimination of any kind of combustion chamber:

Instead, bombs would be ejected backwards from the vehicle, followed by solid-propellant disks. The explosions would vaporize the disks, and the resulting plasma would impinge upon a pusher plate. The advantage of this system is that no attempt is made to confine the explosions, implying that relatively high-yield (hence high-power) bombs may be used. Such a system is neither temperature- nor power-limited. Ulam may have been influenced by experiments conducted at the Eniwetok proving grounds, where graphite-covered steel spheres were suspended thirty feet from the center of an atomic explosion. The spheres were later found intact; a thin layer of graphite had been ablated from their surfaces.

Although the project was not full of Nazi rocket-scientists, it did follow certain German models:

Project Orion was born in 1958 at General Atomics in San Diego. The company, now a subsidiary of defense giant General Dynamics, was founded by Frederick de Hoffman to develop commercial nuclear reactors. The driving force behind Orion was Theodore Taylor, a veteran of the Los Alamos weapons programs. De Hoffman persuaded Freeman Dyson, a theoretical physicist then at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, to come to San Diego to work on Orion during the 1958-1959 academic year. Dyson says that Taylor adopted a specific management model for the project: the Verein fur Raumschiffahrt (VfR), the German rocket society of the 1920′s and 1930′s which numbered among its members Werner von Braun. The VfR had little structure: no bureaucracy and essentially no division of labor between its members; it accomplished much before it was taken over by the German army. Orion at first was similar: scientists did practical engineering and engineers built working scale models, all on a shoestring budget.

If your team is planning on setting off repeated atomic bomb blasts behind a rocket and smoothing those blasts out with an enormous pusher plate hooked up to shock absorbers, it’s the kind of team that thinks BIG:

At a time when the U.S. was struggling to put a single man into orbit aboard a modified military rocket, Taylor and Dyson were developing plans for a manned voyage of exploration through much of the solar system. The original Orion design called for 2000 pulse units, far more than enough to attain Earth escape velocity. “Our motto was ‘Mars by 1965, Saturn by 1970′”, recalls Dyson. Orion would have been more akin to the rocket ships of science fiction than to the cramped capsules of Gagarin and Glenn. One hundred and fifty people could have lived aboard in relative comfort; the useful payload would have been measured in thousands of tons. Orion would have been built like a battleship, with no need for the excruciating weight-saving measures adopted by chemically-propelled spacecraft.

Chemical rockets, the Orion team felt, weren’t good for going much past the moon — but that wasn’t an issue for the folks handing out defense dollars. They only needed a rocket that could reach the next continent.

And NASA didn’t want to be tarred with the nuclear brush.

Maybe the Chinese’ll give it a go…

Posted in Technology | 10 Comments »

Eric Hautemont of Days of Wonder

Sunday, December 4th, 2011

Eric Hautemont, CEO & co-founder of Days of Wonder, the company behind the boardgame Ticket to Ride, has an interesting history:

I was born in France, came to the US in 1988. I was in the computer graphics industry, and formed Ray Dream. In 1996, I sold Ray Dream to Fractal Design and decided to become a venture capitalist. I wanted to help other small companies get off the ground the way I had gotten help. But I soon discovered that being a VC was a lucrative, but very boring job. Some companies, you’d go to and they’re so smart that you feel you’re bringing down the average IQ by being there, others need so much help you won’t make much of a difference. Either way, most of the time you write a check and then that’s about all you can do — the rest won’t make much of a difference to your fund’s return.

So I wanted to do something else. By this time I had two young kids, and I wasn’t really interested in getting back into the tech-world rat race, working so many hours every week. I wanted something where the pace would be more reasonable. I was thinking about traditional board games. About this time, at Hasbro, the CEO was Alan Hassenfeld, who was the grandson of the founder Henry Hassenfeld. [Hasbro was originally Hassenfeld Brothers and became Hasbro Industries in 1968.] And that was so different from the way things worked in Silicon Valley and the high-tech industry, where things rise and fall and change. I liked the idea of forming something that would last that would still be around in generations. If you look at Monopoly, it was published in the 1930s and is still the highest-selling game. How many other consumer goods can you think of that were at the top of the market over 70 years ago and still are? So at this point I really wanted to think about creating a board game company, and I went back to running a product company, like I had done at Ray Dream. I went to some of the people from Ray Dream — Mark Kaufmann, who was Director of Product Marketing, and Yann Corno, another co-founder of Ray Dream whom I knew from high school — and we started Days of Wonder.

Posted in Business, Games | No Comments »

Scooby-Doo and Secular Humanism

Sunday, December 4th, 2011

There should never, ever be even a trace of the supernatural in the world of Scooby-Doo, Chris Sims says:

The bad guys in every episode aren’t monsters, they’re liars.

I can’t imagine how scandalized those critics who were relieved to have something that was mild enough to not excite their kids would’ve been if they’d stopped for a second and realized what was actually going on. The very first rule of Scooby-Doo, the single premise that sits at the heart of their adventures, is that the world is full of grown-ups who lie to kids, and that it’s up to those kids to figure out what those lies are and call them on it, even if there are other adults who believe those lies with every fiber of their being. And the way that you win isn’t through supernatural powers, or even through fighting. The way that you win is by doing the most dangerous thing that any person being lied to by someone in power can do: You think.

But it’s not just that the crooks in Scooby-Doo are liars; nobody ever shows up to bilk someone out of their life savings by pretending to be a Nigerian prince or something. It’s always phantasms and Frankensteins, and there’s a very good reason for that. The bad guys in Scooby-Doo prey on superstition, because that’s the one thing that an otherwise rational person doesn’t really think through. It’s based on belief, not evidence, which is a crucial element for the show. If, for example, someone knocks on your door and claims to be a police officer, you’re going to want to see a badge because that’s the tangible evidence that you’ve come to expect to prove their claim. If, however, you hold the belief that the old run-down theater has a phantom in the basement, then the existence of that phantom himself — or at least a reasonably convincing costume — is all the evidence that you need to believe that you were right all along. The bad guys are just reinforcing a belief that the other characters already have, and that they don’t need any evidence before because it’s based in superstition, not reason.
[...]
To paraphrase G.K. Chesterton, Scooby Doo has value not because it shows us that there are monsters, but because it shows us that those monsters are just the products of evil people who want to make us too afraid to see through their lies, and goes a step further by giving us a blueprint that shows exactly how to defeat them.

That’s what makes the show great. That’s why Scooby Doo endures when similar shows like Speed Buggy or Jabberjaw or even the surreal masterpiece that is Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kids fall by the wayside: Because it’s not just a show about a bunch of kids and their talking dog fighting monsters. But when you add in the supernatural, that’s exactly what it becomes.

(Hat tip to Boing Boing’s Maggie Koerth-Baker, who calls it Veggie Tales for secular humanists.)

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North Carolina Beer Gardens

Saturday, December 3rd, 2011

Asheville, North Carolina is becoming the craft brewery capital of the Southeast, if not the nation, State Rep. Tim Moffitt claims, and a new law could accelerate that:

The legislation now before Gov. Bev Perdue would allow all breweries in the state, regardless of size, to offer tastings and sell beer onsite, even beers they produce outside North Carolina.

It’s aimed at attracting Sierra Nevada and New Belgium, two well-known midsize breweries, to western North Carolina. But brewers hope it further ferments the state’s reputation as a beer capital.

Todd Ford, who opened the NoDa Brewing Company and taproom with his wife a month ago, said he doesn’t worry about the potential competition. He feels a law that boosts interest in craft beers or beer tourism will benefit brewers like him.

“If somebody’s likely to go to a Sierra Nevada taproom and have a Sierra Nevada beer, they’re more likely to try my beer,” he said. “I may have to share those sales with Sierra Nevada, but it’s much more likely to bring more craft beer drinkers to me.”

Until now, state law reserved the beer garden niche to breweries that produced less than 25,000 barrels a year, using the cap as a way to help regulate alcohol sales. All of the state’s approximately 50 small craft breweries fit under the ceiling in the existing law.

State Rep. Tim Moffitt, an Asheville Republican, said the change would help attract the Colorado-based New Belgium and the California-based Sierra Nevada to open East Coast production facilities, potentially creating about 275 jobs and more than $200 million in capital investments.

New Belgium is looking to open a facility in Asheville and Sierra Nevada is eyeing property in Hendersonville, officials said.

“Asheville is becoming the craft brewery capital of the Southeast, if not the nation,” Moffitt said. “This was a small change in the law to allow our state to benefit from additional jobs and additional investment.”

The bulk of North Carolina’s current small breweries produce less than 20,000 barrels a year, but the two new companies could each produce about 200,000 barrels annually, officials said.

But by removing the cap, the law also would allow mega-beer producers, such as Budweiser and MillerCoors, to tread on the craft brewers’ turf with tasting rooms. MillerCoors owns a brewery in Eden that produces 9 million barrels a day, but a beverage industry representative told lawmakers there are no current plans for it to develop an onsite retail component.

The folks at Reason are clearly in favor of free beer… markets:

Posted in Business, Policy | No Comments »

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