The Stoner Arms Dealers

Friday, April 6th, 2012

Guy Lawson of Rolling Stone calls David Packouz and Efraim Diveroli the stoner arms dealers as he describes how their $300 million contract to deliver guns and ammo to the Afghans on behalf of the American government started to unravel:

But as Packouz’s miso-marinated Chilean sea bass arrived, his cellphone rang. It was the freight forwarder he had employed to make sure the ammunition made it from Hungary to Kabul. The man sounded panicked.

“We’ve got a problem,” he told Packouz, shouting to be heard over the restaurant’s thumping music. “The plane has been seized on the runway in Kyrgyzstan.”

The arms shipment, it appeared, was being used as a bargaining chip in a high-stakes standoff between George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin. The Russian president didn’t like NATO expanding into Kyrgyzstan, and the Kyrgyzs wanted the U.S. government to pay more rent to use their airport as a crucial supply line for the war in Afghanistan. Putin’s allies in the Kyrgyz KGB, it seemed, were holding the plane hostage — and Packouz was going to be charged a $300,000 fine for every day it sat on the runway. Word of the seizure quickly reached Washington, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates himself was soon on his way to Kyrgyzstan to defuse the mounting tensions.

Packouz was baffled, stoned and way out of his league. “It was surreal,” he recalls. “Here I was dealing with matters of international security, and I was half-baked. I didn’t know anything about the situation in that part of the world. But I was a central player in the Afghan war — and if our delivery didn’t make it to Kabul, the entire strategy of building up the Afghanistan army was going to fail. It was totally killing my buzz. There were all these shadowy forces, and I didn’t know what their motives were. But I had to get my shit together and put my best arms-dealer face on.”

Sitting in the restaurant, Packouz tried to clear his head, cupping a hand over his cellphone to shut out the noise. “Tell the Kyrgyz KGB that ammo needs to get to Afghanistan!” he shouted into the phone. “This contract is part of a vital mission in the global war on terrorism. Tell them that if they fuck with us, they are fucking with the government of the United States of America!”

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South Park Passover

Thursday, April 5th, 2012

In the latest episode of South Park, Cartman hallucinates that he’s Pharoah’s son at the time of the first Passover:



Naturally the show goes a bit too far:

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The Pleasures of Drowning

Thursday, April 5th, 2012

If you watch footage of old judo masters demonstrating their skills against their own students, it’s unclear just what they could do against a resisting opponent — but these masters have long track-records of trouncing such resisting opponents in their youth:



The same cannot be said of all martial arts masters. In the case of aikido master Yanagi Ryuken, things got out of hand — quite literally:



Apparently he and his students believed their own hype — which led to this rendez-vous with reality:



As Sam Harris notes, it is sad to see a confused old man repeatedly punched in the face, but you can take some satisfaction in seeing a collective delusion so emphatically dispelled.

And that’s why Mr. Harris is now studying Brazilian jiu-jitsu and experiencing the pleasures of drowning:

It is a remarkable property of grappling that the distance between theory and reality can be fully bridged.

I can now attest that the experience of grappling with an expert is akin to falling into deep water without knowing how to swim. You will make a furious effort to stay afloat — and you will fail. Once you learn how to swim, however, it becomes difficult to see what the problem is — why can’t a drowning man just relax and tread water? The same inscrutable difference between lethal ignorance and lifesaving knowledge can be found on the mat: To train in BJJ is to continually drown — or, rather, to be drowned, in sudden and ingenious ways — and to be taught, again and again, how to swim.

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Five Best War Memoirs

Thursday, April 5th, 2012

Max Hastings shares his list of the five best war memoirs:

The Letters of Private Wheeler
Edited by B.H. Liddell-Hart (1951)

My father was editing a now long-defunct British publication, The Strand Magazine, when one day in 1948 a reader sent him a big bundle of ancient letters, penned in an early 19th-century scrawl. They proved a treasure trove, published as “The Letters of Private Wheeler,” the finest ranker’s memoir of the Napoleonic wars. If anybody today asks me what life and death were like for an ordinary infantryman in a Western army of the 18th and 19th centuries, the horrors endured by men firing upon each other in battle hour after hour at ranges of often less than 50 yards, I refer them to William Wheeler.

The Autobiography of Lieutenant-General Sir Harry Smith (1903)

It seems extraordinary to most civilians that any soldier could enjoy any war, but many did and indeed still do. Sir Harry Smith was a Norfolk surgeon’s son who joined the Rifle Brigade in 1805 and served through a host of campaigns thereafter, including Spain, New Orleans, Waterloo, assorted Indian and South African wars. His brainless, shamelessly joyous reminiscences of a thousand camps, marches, skirmishes and great battles show the soldier as adventurer. Sensitive enough to deplore, during the War of 1812, the “barbarous” burning of the White House, Smith was nonetheless among those who ate the dinner that he and his comrades found on President Madison’s table.

Lady Under Fire on the Western Front
Edited by Andrew and Nicola Hallam (2010)

This work offers an unusual perspective on World War I, delivered through the letters of 25-year-old Lady Dorothie Feilding, who served as an ambulance driver in Belgium and France between 1914 and 1917. Although Feilding deplored the conflict’s horrors, she relished the opportunity to join the select few in her generation of privileged European girls who were freed from the dreary confinement of the social round at home.

Sagittarius Rising
By Cecil Lewis (1936)

One of the best fliers’ memoirs ever written. It is hard for our generation, for whom flight is a commonplace, to grasp the soaring sense of liberation that pioneer airmen in World War I gained from escaping the bondage of earth. Most thought it a fair exchange that, in return for wings, they endured perils statistically greater even than those of trench officers.

A Writer at War
By Vasily Grossman (2005)

Vasily Grossman was a celebrated Russian war correspondent, but his dispatches about the Red Army’s experience during World War II were rigorously censored. By contrast, Grossman’s notebooks, published as “A Writer at War,” frankly depict the chaos, anguish, incompetence, heroism, cowardice and ultimate triumph of Russia’s struggle.

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The Origins of Risk

Wednesday, April 4th, 2012

I knew that the interminable, high-concept board game Risk was originally devised by a Frenchman, but I didn’t realize he was already famous for something else entirely:

Created by Albert Lamorisse on a family vacation to Holland, La Conquête du Monde (The Conquest of the World) was released by the French game company Miro in 1957.

The name given by Lamorisse is eerily descriptive and more apt than the one christened by Parker Brothers in 1959, Risk.

Albert Lamorisse in known for more than this contribution to the world of gaming, as the Frenchman won the 1956 Academy Award for best screenplay for The Red Balloon, a thirty-four minute film directed by Lamorisse capturing the movement of a sentient balloon as it follows Lamorisse’s son and several other children.

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Little League

Wednesday, April 4th, 2012

Yale Stewart’s Little League imagines the Justice League as children:

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Ikea Urbanism

Wednesday, April 4th, 2012

Ikea’s LandProp Services is bringing Scandinavian urban design to England:

Amid this 11-hectare expanse of ancient rusting machinery, waste piles and grinding construction equipment is a converted brick sugar warehouse where a team of Swedes and Brits are poring over blueprints and renderings. LandProp Services bought the land in 2009. Their vision is to turn this grey netherworld, once planning approval is done, into a tightly packed neighbourhood they’ll call Strand East.

It will look, once complete, like a reproduction of the sort of historic, chic downtown neighbourhoods you find in the far more central parts of London or Paris, not in this distant expanse of former dockyards and bloodless public-housing project. At its core are straight, car-free streets lined with simple townhouses and ground-floor-access flats in five-storey rows. In the alleyways behind – an imitation of the classic London backstreet, the mews – will be little two- and three-storey homes, all with direct access to the street.

The 1,200 homes and apartments, 40 per cent of them large enough for families (making it a much more child-filled place than most post-industrial developments), will be priced to appeal to a range of incomes, the Swedes promise. A few seven- to 11-storey condominium towers will pepper the area, and offices for high-tech firms and a hotel will fill the busier edges. Secreted beneath the whole structure is an underground parking garage, to keep cars off the interior streets. Bus lanes and pedestrian walkways will cut across it, squares and public areas abound. The whole thing is designed to create the sense of felicity and discovery you get when wandering a historic European neighbourhood – or, for that matter, an Ikea store.

[...]

But what might make it seem alien to Brits and North Americans is Ikea’s very active role in the neighbourhood’s life – in large part because the houses will be fully owned by Ikea. In a model that is the norm in Sweden and other parts of continental Europe, but alien to English-speaking countries, this will be an all-rental private neighbourhood, run and overseen by a private company.

[...]

The answer, Mr. Müller says, is that the Swedes have a long-term interest in success – much like a municipal council does, and, in fact, Ikea will be acting very much like a municipal government.

After all, what IKEA is really doing here is finding a place to sink a small part of its huge pile of cash. They want to earn a profit over 10 to 20 years, not the three or four years of a conventional property developer – and are therefore very interested in the long-term livability of the project.

“We’re just securing our money long-term – and of course creating more profits at the end,” Mr. Müller says. “But we are acting as a long-term investor, we are equity-driven, so we are acting very differently from a developer.” In a very real sense, the furniture company wants to invest its money in your entire life.

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How hard is it to stab a zombie through the skull?

Tuesday, April 3rd, 2012

The knife-nerds at Cold Steel reacted to a recent episode of Walking Dead exactly as they should have — they asked, How hard is it to stab a zombie through the skull?



(Hat tip to Kit Up!.)

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Light Works Like a Drug

Tuesday, April 3rd, 2012

Light works like a drug — and not all light has the same effect:

Any sort of light can suppress melatonin, but recent experiments have raised novel questions about one type in particular: the blue wavelengths produced by many kinds of energy-efficient light bulbs and electronic gadgets.

Dr. Brainard and other researchers have found that light composed of blue wavelengths slows the release of melatonin with particular effectiveness. Until recently, though, few studies had directly examined how blue-emitting electronics might affect the brain.

So scientists at the University of Basel in Switzerland tried a simple experiment: They asked 13 men to sit before a computer each evening for two weeks before going to bed.

During one week, for five hours every night, the volunteers sat before an old-style fluorescent monitor emitting light composed of several colors from the visible spectrum, though very little blue. Another week, the men sat at screens backlighted by light-emitting diodes, or LEDs. This screen was twice as blue.

“To our surprise, we saw huge differences,” said Christian Cajochen, who heads the Center for Chronobiology at the University of Basel. Melatonin levels in volunteers watching the LED screens took longer to rise at night, compared with when the participants were watching the fluorescent screens, and the deficit persisted throughout the evening.

The subjects also scored higher on tests of memory and cognition after exposure to blue light, Dr. Cajochen and his team reported in the May issue of The Journal of Applied Physiology. While men were able to recall pairs of words flashed across the fluorescent screen about half the time, some scores rose to almost 70 percent when they stared at the LED monitors.

The finding adds to a series of others suggesting, though certainly not proving, that exposure to blue light may keep us more awake and alert, partly by suppressing production of melatonin. An LED screen bright enough and big enough “could be giving you an alert stimulus at a time that will frustrate your body’s ability to go to sleep later,” said Dr. Brainard. “When you turn it off, it doesn’t mean that instantly the alerting effects go away. There’s an underlying biology that’s stimulated.”

[...]

Artificial light has been around for more than 120 years. But the light emitted by older sources, like incandescent bulbs, contains more red wavelengths. The problem now, Dr. Brainard and other researchers fear, is that our world is increasingly illuminated in blue. By one estimate, 1.6 billion new computers, televisions and cellphones were sold last year alone, and incandescent lights are being replaced by more energy-efficient, and often bluer, bulbs.

In January in the journal PLoS One, the University of Basel team also compared the effects of incandescent bulbs to fluorescents modified to emit more blue light. Men exposed to the fluorescent lights produced 40 percent less melatonin than when they were exposed to incandescent bulbs, and they reported feeling more awake an hour after the lights went off.

In addition, the quantity of light necessary to affect melatonin may be much smaller than once thought. In research published in March in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, a team at the Harvard Medical School reported that ordinary indoor lighting before bedtime suppressed melatonin in the brain, even delaying production of the hormone for 90 minutes after the lights were off, compared with people exposed to only dim light.

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Red Phoenix Rising

Tuesday, April 3rd, 2012

I’ve mentioned before how the Soviets did not wait until the Cold War to start copying western military technologies. For instance, the Tupolev Tu-4 bomber was a Boeing B-29 Superfortress.

Our own perfidious Buckethead knew quite a bit about that piece of history, because his father wrote an Air and Space piece about it.

And now Buckethead’s dad’s book — Red Phoenix Rising — has come out, and the Washington Times has reviewed it:

So when German attack planes appeared, they found hundreds of VVS aircraft — bombers, fighters and reconnaissance planes — “parked in long rows, as if on display.” In the course of about 20 minutes, the Soviet western air district lost 347 planes of 409 deployed.

Losses were equally severe elsewhere. Even now, exact figures are difficult to come by. German claims — up to 1,200 aircraft the first days — were so high that even the air commander, Hermann Goering, “a man often prone to hyperbole,” suspected exaggeration. He demanded further study. “The subsequent recount, to his amazement, added 300 Soviet aircraft to the original figure.” (One Russian archive source cited puts the two-day loss at 3,822 aircraft, versus just 78 enemy downed.)

As a crash aircraft-manufacturing program got under way, surviving aviators made do with what they could. Some pilots — volunteers — opted to ram German aircraft. Relatively slow-moving German bombers were a favored target. The Soviet pilot did this by “approaching from the rear, adjusting the speed to the enemy plane at close quarters, and then pushing the tip of his propeller into the opponent’s rudder or elevator.” Once contact was made, the Soviet pilot would drop away quickly. Results were never predictable. “Frequently both fell into a spin.” As the authors write, ramming “reflected a higher calling of patriotism, the willingness to place one’s own life in harm’s way to achieve a tactical victory.”

A frantic building program in the Urals, far from the battlefronts, in time enabled the VVS to achieve numerical parity with the Luftwaffe. Hitler’s military, meanwhile, was so overextended that his air force could not replace lost planes. The Soviets also made wide use of camouflage to conceal likely targets. “The Kremlin walls were disguised as apartment facades with the use of contrasting colors.” Netting was draped over the golden cupolas. “Lenin’s tomb was reshaped with scaffolding to appear as a two-story building.”

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APS Underwater Assault Rifle

Monday, April 2nd, 2012

In the early 1970s, the Soviets developed their APS Underwater Assault Rifle:

The APS was intially based on the AK-74 rifle, but several significant changes were made. It fires a 120mm long 5.6mm dart or flechette, which is relatively stable traveling underwater — it uses a smoothbore barrel and relies on the shape of the dart for stability and accuracy. The dart is fired by a standard (although well waterproofed) cartridge case with powder and primer. The magazine shape is dictated by the long projectiles, and holds 26 rounds.

The rifle uses a gas piston like the AK to operate, but fires from an open bolt. This ensures that the barrel remains filled with water, which is necessary to properly stabilize the projectiles. It can be fired dry above water, but this is inaccurate and causes significant wear to the gun. The trigger mechanism has a selector for semi or full automatic fire, and a collapsing wire buttstock provides some stability.

The APS is by far the most fully developed underwater firearm in use, although it does have shortcomings. The wide magazine profile can make maneuvering in water somewhat difficult, and the sights are simple and crude.

Because of increasing water pressure, the APS performs differently at different depths. As one submerges farther, the cyclic rate of the weapon slows down and the muzzle velocity and effective range decrease. At 5m depth, the APS is considered to have an effective range of 30m, decreasing to 11m at a depth of 40m. This change in pressure also necessitates a self-adjusting gas system, to ensure that the action cycles reliably in different pressures. The notion of designing an effective underwater firearm really bring to light a number of interesting considerations not relevant on normal guns.

(Hat tip to Borepatch, who pointed to the Forgotten Weapons site.)

Posted in War, Weapons | 1 Comment »

Quest View

Sunday, April 1st, 2012

Google Maps has introduced an old-school 8-bit video-game Quest View to turn your commute into a computer roleplaying game.

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