They never really learned how to use what they had anyway

Thursday, May 9th, 2019

Dunlap periodically dips back into the alleged topic of his book:

The 1930’s were a period of great research in small arms all over the world, resulting in the U. S. of the adoption of the M1 or Garand rifle; in Germany of the Walther development of the double-action pistol and of the Spandau or roller-bearing machine gun bolt locking by the rotating collar systems; in Italy of the Breda machine guns and Beretta pistols; in England of the Mk. IV or No. 4 rifle and the Bren gun; and in Japan of their gas-operated machine weapons and their 7.7mm rifles.

[...]

Where [the Japanese] cut their own throats on small arms was when they allowed their national poverty to influence them. They would make good ammunition, and pack it in flimsy crates, which dissolved under rough transportation and bad weather. They made fair ammunition, but tried to avoid waterproofing it, so a lot of it went bad in the jungle, as happened often with grenades and mortar shells. The brass in their small-arms ammunition was poor, and in my opinion is the reason why they had a different case for machine guns than for rifles.

[...]

As a Mauser military bolt-action, the Japanese Model 38 modification is one of the very best. The Nips improved a good many features of the original German bolt system, incorporating some ideas not found in any other arm. The bolt stop, for instance, does not contact and batter the rear of the left locking lug, as in other Mausers, including Springfields and Enfields. A second small lug is located directly behind the locking lug (11/16″ between rear surfaces) and this contacts the bolt stop.

[...]

The ejector cut in the Arisaka’s left locking lug is angled so that it does not touch the rear surface therefore the full area of the lug remains unmarred, making for theoretically better locking and wear, since there are no grooves or burrs to carry grit or dirt into the locking recesses and cause undue wear.

[...]

The Arisaka locking lugs are set back from the face of the bolt and rounded on their leading edges. As in the Mauser 98 bolt, this location is a claimed advantage in that the lugs being well back from the bolt face, they are less liable to break or crack diagonally from the face of bolt to rear of lugs.

[...]

The design of bolt mechanism prevents rearward escape of gas, giving almost positive safety to the eyes and face.

[...]

The bolt has the fastest and easiest takedown of any rifle yet encountered.

[...]

Firing pin, striker and cocking piece are combined in one part, hollowed to receive the mainspring inside it. This principle is familiar in machine guns and other automatic weapons, but not seen in bolt rifles very often.

[...]

Unless the rifle is rusted or otherwise out of good condition, it is possible to set and unset the safety by a simple rotating motion of the ball of the right thumb, and it can be operated in complete silence. I am inclined to give the Japs the blue ribbon on this feature, feeling it is the best safety of any military rifle in accessibility, reliability and ease of operation.

[...]

When the Pacific jungle fighting proved that leather was poor stuff, they were ready with a really good substitute, rubberized canvas. Not only rifle and light machine gun slings were made of this material, but also belts, cartridge pouches, bayonet scabbard frogs and at the last, pistol holsters. Water, mold, mildew, bugs — nothing bothered the stuff.

[...]

The famous Japanese no-smoke, no-flash sniper cartridge was their ordinary 6.5mm reduced charge, consisting of a pointed 137-grain cupro-nickel or gilding-metal jacketed bullet, pushed by a scant 30.0 grains of flake nitro-cellulose powder, which appears and acts very similar to that used in the German service cartridge.

[...]

In the ordinary cartridge, either reduced or full load, the flash was practically eliminated by the long barrels which completely burned the powder of the charge. I know from experience that it was just about impossible to spot any smoke from a shot, even in pretty good light.

[...]

The flake type of powder is a little less inclined to smoke than our own tubular-grain types, but most of the “smoke” from a modern rifle is really vapor caused from the meeting of the gases with colder air. In warm air, or especially in warm dry air, the smoke of any firearm is decreased appreciably.

[...]

Now for the Model 94 (1934) pistol! Here the Japs got even for their good work on the preceding handguns; this is the only thing the Japs made that is as bad as the backslapping saps in this country said everything Japanese was. It does not have a single redeeming feature and is a good example of how a pistol should not be made.

[...]

The little-known Japanese officer’s pistol, the 7mm Nambu, was a beautifully made junior-size true Nambu, with grip safety, the one off-set recoil spring, and the same locking system. The 7mm was originally intended to be an officer’s weapon, and the 8mm to be the enlisted men’s sidearm. This idea was too silly to last long even among the medieval-minded samurai worshippers, so did not get far.

[...]

For practical field use in close-up infantry fighting such as went on in the jungles and mountains of the Pacific war where both sides could not park very long at any one spot because of mortar use, the Japanese machine gun was not so good. The gun itself weighed 61 pounds and the tripod 61 more — a total of 122 pounds which is about 90 too much, and is undoubtedly the reason the Japs liked to get our 1919A4 Brownings, weighing only 30 pounds and which one man could carry over his shoulder like a rifle.

[...]

During the war the Japanese developed several nice items in the weapon line but did not get production on any of them to amount to anything. By the time they were able to build first-class equipment the B-29’s were over Japan and they could not even protect their factories. By the time they were able to build good enough antiaircraft guns and fighter planes to combat the bombers, there was not much left to protect or build them with. They never really learned how to use what they had anyway.

Posted in Roy Dunlap, War, Weapons | 1 Comment »

People can come to a common conclusion for sensible reasons and for vile reasons

Wednesday, May 8th, 2019

Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, has a new book out, Upheaval: How Nations Cope with Crisis and Change, which presents a forceful if rather old-fashioned argument for the continuing importance of nationhood:

“There are about a billion Africans in Africa and almost all of them would be better off economically and politically and in terms of personal safety in Europe,” he says. “The cruel reality is that it’s impossible for Europe to admit a billion Africans but Europeans will not acknowledge this conflict between ideals and reality.”

He concedes that this stance puts him on the same side of the argument as people such as the populist Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. “It’s unfortunate that people can come to a common conclusion for sensible reasons and for vile reasons,” he says. “But because of the relative lack of honest discussion, the issue has gotten hijacked by the racists, just as in the United States.”

Steve Sailer is a huge Jared Diamond fan:

I pointed out back in 2005 that if you read Diamond’s book Collapse carefully, you’ll notice he’s an immigration heretic.

Here’s my 1997 book review in National Review of Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel.

Personally, I’m a huge Jared Diamond fan. His 1991 collection of his magazine articles, The Third Chimpanzee, helped inspire me to follow his path in switching over from a sensible career to writing highbrow popular articles.

Posted in Policy, Science | 6 Comments »

The ride through the Japanese capital was both interesting and instructive

Wednesday, May 8th, 2019

The ride through the Japanese capital was both interesting and instructive, Dunlap found, as “our fire bombs had burned three-quarters of the city”:

In fact, just about everything inflammable was destroyed. Very little high explosive had been dropped on the city itself, so all the roads and bridges were in use, most of them completely undamaged.

[...]

Ruined lathes and other machines stood deserted, evidence of the effectiveness of strategic bombing.

[...]

Not so many had the horn-rimmed spectacles of the propaganda boys and the cartoonists, but some did. A few looked more Caucasian than Oriental, and I saw quite a few with rosy complexions, with no sign of yellow. The “yellow” business is overworked of course. A proportion of Chinese and Japanese have yellowish coloring, but most are just brown. We got a kick out of the color scheme, for we, the whites, were darker than the Japs and a lot of us had atabrine tans making us as yellow as the yellowest!

[...]

The kids were just kids. They enjoyed the parade and laughed and waved. After awhile some of the men began to wave back. Regardless of color or race, kids have the same ideas and do not have any “nationality” politically. You cannot get mad at a grinning sprout who thinks soldiers are swell and candy even better, even if you have been trying to catch his big brother or his old man in the sights of a gun for a couple of years.

[...]

Samurai style swords were in fair demand, although not as popular as pistols. We had only a few good ones (older blades, property of private officers, probably), most being army issue type, with metal handles.

[...]

Legitimate old swords have long handles, about 12″, and the scabbard will always be of wood, covered with leather. The handles, whether decorated or not, have wooden bases, formed of two pieces, inletted to accept the tang of the blade and held on with just a wooden peg or pin. Usually the name of the sword maker, date, name of owner, etc. is written on a piece of paper under one of these wooden handle halves. Not always, but it was the old custom to do so. The blades of swords were of course beautiful.

[...]

A few explosive bombs had been used against the modern buildings, without too much success. Tokyo’s recent buildings were of the earthquake-resistant architecture and therefore could take a beating.

[...]

A pretty good deal, as the yen was valued at 62/3¢ — 15 to the dollar.

[...]

I saw sailors doing a brisk business in cigarettes and candy, at terrific prices. The Japs had had no place to spend their money and were crazy to get sweets or good tobacco, or food. During the war their civilian ration of sugar had been about one tablespoon per month. Despite their low pay rates, they were paying as high as 30 yen ($2.00) for a pack of cigarettes and about the same for chocolate bars.

[...]

Japanese police guarded the palace and directed traffic on most busy corners. All wore blue uniforms and carried their little dress swords, symbols of their authority to the Japanese. The swords were a straight, unsharpened ceremonial type, with knuckle-guards like a saber, comparable to our “lodge” swords, though smaller. In no case did they have the old short fighting sword, which resembles the two-handed samurai long weapons.

Posted in Roy Dunlap, War | 2 Comments »

Getting home and out of the army meant the real end of the war

Tuesday, May 7th, 2019

The end of the war in Europe meant that Dunlap’s division in the Philippines would be greatly strengthened — to invade Japan:

The war was picking up, even though the replacements got younger and dumber.

Then Japan surrendered, and the men didn’t feel much emotion about it:

No one thought of celebrating much because we knew it would be months before we would get home and to us getting home and out of the army meant the real end of the war.

[...]

The point system was in full swing and a third of the “old men” were gone by the middle of August. I was shy two points, so had to stay. The cavalry was throwing Purple Hearts and Bronze Stars around promiscuously, to give most of their combat men a chance to get enough points to get home before the division left the Philippines. I was now sorry I had not collected a Bronze Star on that last flying column deal. That southern Luzon trip was a sore point with those of us who had been on the contact party with the expedition, for every man who went on it — except us — got the award. Even the guy who brought our mail up to us after we had been on the road a week got one! Of course we did not do anything to deserve any kind of medal, but neither did anybody else on that excursion. Five points was five points. Bronze Stars meant less and less as the war went on, and by the end they had far less value among the soldiers than the Combat Infantryman badge. Company clerks got them for keeping the typewriters clean; or getting fresh eggs for the captain. All officers gave them to themselves; every officer I knew of had one. That is no exaggeration.

Posted in Roy Dunlap, War | 4 Comments »

Bamboo looks like a kind of meat

Monday, May 6th, 2019

The Giant Panda is a closet carnivore:

The giant panda, a consummate vegetarian, belongs to a group of mammals called Carnivora, so-called because almost all of them — dogs, cats, hyenas, weasels, mongooses, raccoons, and more — eat meat. But the giant panda’s diet of bamboo, and little else, makes it a vegetarian.

At least, outwardly.

Yonggang Nie and Fuwen Wei of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have spent years tracking wild pandas, analyzing exactly what kinds of bamboo they eat, and measuring the chemicals within those mouthfuls. And they found that the nutrient profile of a panda’s all-bamboo diet — very high in protein, and low in carbohydrates — is much closer to that of a typical carnivore than to that of other plant-eating mammals. “It was a surprise,” Wei says. Nutritionally, “bamboo looks like a kind of meat.”

[...]

Plant-eating mammals almost always have enlarged, elongated guts to slow the passage of food, and to give their inner bacteria more time to digest their meals. The panda, however, has the short, vanilla gut of a carnivore. Even its gut microbes are closer to a bear’s than, say, a cow’s or deer’s. Nie and Wei’s study makes sense of this paradoxical combination of traits. The giant panda has the plumbing of a half-committed herbivore because it has the diet of a closet carnivore.

Posted in Animals, Science | 3 Comments »

Make the top sergeants act as bartenders

Monday, May 6th, 2019

Dunlap’s finally settled in a former government experimental station for coconut prodcuts, in southern Luzon, with an officer’s club and an NCO club, which was open to anyone:

By putting the liquor on a military basis and making the technical sergeants — and the top sergeants — act as bartenders everything was kept under a fairly sensible schedule. Prices were lower than in the native joints, we had ice, electric lights, and it was not necessary to worry about the next day, for individual capacities were known and watched.

Posted in Roy Dunlap, War | No Comments »

Cheating by American celebrities is more fun

Sunday, May 5th, 2019

College admissions cheating by American celebrities is more fun, Steve Sailer notes, but cheating by Chinese nationals is a much bigger problem, Los Angeles Magazine reports:

According to prosecutors, Cai, along with four current and former UCLA students and another student at Cal State Fullerton, helped at least 40 Chinese nationals obtain student visas by fraudulently taking the TOEFL, an English proficiency exam, on their behalf. Cai’s ringers would show up to testing sites with fake Chinese passports bearing their own photos but with the names of the clients. Where Cai slipped — and where investigators caught up to him — was charging 39 test registration payments to his credit card.

Any other day the UCLA bust might have made national headlines, but the news got swamped by a bigger, sexier college cheating scandal: Operation Varsity Blues. (The UCLA investigation was dubbed “Operation TOEFL Recall.”) While the UCLA case is less shocking — bribes in thousands of dollars instead of millions; Chinese high schoolers instead of Full House cast members — it represents an equally notable underbelly of American college admissions.

[...]

It’s hard to find data on cheating that is broken down by country of origin, but a survey of 14 public universities by The Wall Street Journal found that in the 2014-15 school year, those universities reported cheating among international students at a rate five times higher than among domestic students. In 2018 a professor at UC Santa Barbara told the Los Angeles Times that Chinese students comprise 6 percent of the student body but account for a third of plagiarism cases. A 2016 study conducted by United Kingdom newspaper The Times says that students from outside the European Union were four times more likely to cheat than U.K. and European Union students.

Posted in Education, Policy | 1 Comment »

Buildings lost either way

Sunday, May 5th, 2019

Dunlap saw Manila burn — for weeks:

What the Japanese could not burn, they holed up in, so we blasted them out. Buildings lost either way — either the Japs fired or demolished them or we blew them apart dislodging Nips.

[...]

A lot of naval depth charges were used for both demolition and antitank mines, and what happens to a Sherman tank when it runs up against that much TNT in one package is a caution.

Then they moved on:

Two of my old squad in the MP’s were killed in the city, and several other MP’s as well. They were practically a reconnaissance outfit by now, under a new officer who wanted to see the war first-hand at all times (he eventually went home with a hole in him, and the boys went back to regular schedule, on which they had a better than 50-50 chance of finishing the war).

[...]

I feel us rear-echelon men should be better taken care of. Rifle bullets I can take or leave, if necessary; bombs don’t bother me too much; planes I did not worry about; but artillery is unpopular.

[...]

Our trouble started when some dim-witted Air Corps colonel parked his personal B-25 (not a bomber, but an aerial limousine) right in front of us, not 50 yards from my tent. It was mirror-shiny and could be seen 30 miles, let alone three. Naturally the Nips could not pass it up, so they threw three or four shells at it about 10 o’clock that night. Luckily, all went over both the plane and us.

[...]

When my company left Alabang and headed south to keep in touch with the troops we began to see for the first time towns destroyed by the war. I say the war, and exclude Manila because these towns and small cities had been burned before our invasion, and not specifically because of it. Southern Luzon is covered with these ruins, as about nine out of 10 towns are gone. Nearly all had been burned because of the guerrilla movement. If the town was big enough to be strategically important, the Japs put a garrison in it and the Filipino guerrillas destroyed it to get rid of the Japs; if the town was small, the guerrillas moved in and the Japs burned it to get them out. The community lost either way. These were not jungle villages, but semimodern cities up to 40,000 in prewar population.

[...]

The boys made quite a haul in loot, in an indirect way, here. There were many diamonds in the ruins of the church, from the rings and earrings of the murdered Filipino women, and by going through the ashes in one of the rooms it was possible to find them. Unfortunately for me, I did not find out about it until it was cleaned out. After the company moved up, it was a common pastime to go through the ashes of some of the destroyed homes and find coins. Evidently there had been forgotten hoards in a lot of houses, for the boys found Spanish coins dating as far back as the 17th century.

Posted in Roy Dunlap, War | No Comments »

Afghan pilots will no longer be trained in the United States

Saturday, May 4th, 2019

Afghan AC-208 pilots will no longer be trained in the United States, because more than 40 percent of the students training here ended up deserting within U.S. borders.

Posted in Policy, War | No Comments »

The lieutenant in charge took a walk

Saturday, May 4th, 2019

Dunlap managed to avoid an ugly firefight:

They were pinned down at one spot for several hours and accounted for over 100 Nips with machine gun fire. Finally a tank came looking for them and got them out of trouble, but it was really an engagement. The lieutenant in charge took a walk when the shooting started, and a part-Indian staff sergeant took over and ran the bunch. He got a Silver Star and a commission out of it and a couple of other NCOs collected Bronze Stars. I think the G.I. who ran the .50-caliber on the weapons-carrier and did most of the damage got something out of it a few months later. Nothing was ever done to the lieutenant other than to give him a five or six weeks’ vacation in a “rest camp” and a transfer. An enlisted man would have drawn 15 years for running away, if he was not shot by the rest of the gang. That officer was kept away from the company, just in case.

Posted in Roy Dunlap, War | No Comments »

There should be a book like this for every major political issue

Friday, May 3rd, 2019

You should buy the Caplan and Weinersmith Open Borders book, Tyler Cowen says, even though he doesn’t share their opinion:

And no I do not favor open borders even though I do favor a big increase in immigration into the United States, both high- and low-skilled. The simplest argument against open borders is the political one. Try to apply the idea to Cyprus, Taiwan, Israel, Switzerland, and Iceland and see how far you get. Big countries will manage the flow better than the small ones but suddenly the burden of proof is shifted to a new question: can we find any countries big enough (or undesirable enough) where truly open immigration might actually work?

In my view the open borders advocates are doing the pro-immigration cause a disservice. The notion of fully open borders scares people, it should scare people, and it rubs against their risk-averse tendencies the wrong way. I am glad the United States had open borders when it did, but today there is too much global mobility and the institutions and infrastructure and social welfare policies of the United States are, unlike in 1910, already too geared toward higher per capita incomes than what truly free immigration would bring. Plunking 500 million or a billion poor individuals in the United States most likely would destroy the goose laying the golden eggs. (The clever will note that this problem is smaller if all wealthy countries move to free immigration at the same time, but of course that is unlikely.)

He concludes that there should be a book like this, or two, for every major political issue of import.

Posted in Policy | 8 Comments »

The little creatures have unlimited courage

Friday, May 3rd, 2019

Dunlap and the other American soldiers liked the local spider monkeys:

For some reason the monkeys all disliked the Filipinos and would attack them every chance they got. Their mouths are so small they cannot do much damage unless they can get a loose fold of skin or flesh but the little creatures have unlimited courage and do not hesitate to attack anyone they get angry at. And it was easy to “sic” them on any particular person. Just a little moral backing and one of those six or eight pound monks would tackle a tank.

Posted in Animals, Roy Dunlap, War | No Comments »

Why Twitter isn’t good for coups

Thursday, May 2nd, 2019

Alex Tabarrok cites ”Naunihal Singh interviewed by FP on the uprising in Venezuela – very much in the tradition of Tullock’s classic on Autocracy which argued that so-called popular uprisings almost always mask internal coups and Chwe’s work on the importance of common knowledge for coordinating action”:

Naunihal Singh: Here’s the thing: At the heart of every coup, there is a dilemma for the people in the military. And it goes like this: You need to figure out which side you’re going to support, and in doing so, your primary consideration is to avoid a civil war or a fratricidal conflict.

If done correctly, a coup-maker will get up there and make the case that they have the support of everybody in the military, and therefore any resistance is minor and futile and that everyone should, either actively or passively, support the coup. And if you can convince people that’s the case, it becomes the case.

But in order to do this, you need to convince everyone not only that you’re going to succeed, but that everyone else thinks that you’re going to succeed. And in order to do that, you need to use some sort of public broadcast.

What is important here is the simultaneity of it. It’s the fact that you know that everybody else has heard the same thing as you have. And social media — Twitter — doesn’t do that.

FP: And can you tell us why Twitter isn’t really going to cut it?

NS: What broadcasts do is they create collective belief in collective action. Coup-making is about manipulating people’s beliefs and expectations about each other.

If I’m commanding one unit, even if I see Juan Guaidó’s official Tweet, I’m not going to even know how many other people within the military have seen it. What’s more, I would have good reason to believe that the penetration of this tweet within the military will be pretty slight. I have no idea what internet access is like inside the Venezuelan military right now. But I imagine that most military people don’t follow Juan Guaidó’s feed, because doing so would expose them to sanctions from military intelligence, and in that context, it would very clearly mark them as a traitor. But the other thing is this — what we think of as viral tweets operate on a far slower time scale than a broadcast. And coups happen in hours.

…

FP: Guaidó delivered his message to Venezuela this morning standing in front of men in green fatigues with helmets on, and armored vehicles in the background. Tell me about how Guaidó is drawing on familiar visual strategies of coups. What did he get right and wrong about the optics?

NS: It’s a dawn video, which is very classic. But there’s a problem: Guaidó does have military people there, but in order to be more credible he would have had a high-ranking military figure standing side by side with him. He can’t make it appear like there’s a military takeover. He also has to make it clear that this is a civilian action and that it’s within the constitution. As a result, he’s standing at the front and he’s got some soldiers in the back, but because they are low-ranking soldiers, it doesn’t mean very much, and it doesn’t carry very much weight.

Uri Friedman explains how the plan to oust Venezuela’s ruler went wrong:

With the elaborate, out-of-control bid for regime change in Latin America, the U.S.-Russia proxy struggle, and the intrigue involving shadowy Cuban forces, it was as if the world had suddenly been seized by a live experiment in what the Cold War would have been like had it played out on Twitter. (Bolton’s coup comment, after all, came in response to a reporter’s question about whether the Trump administration was providing any support to Maduro’s challengers beyond “tweets of support,” a query Henry Kissinger never fielded back in the day.)

Tuesday started with Guaidó posting a video on Twitter at dawn of him at a military air base — flanked by soldiers and the imprisoned opposition figure Leopoldo López, apparently freed by security forces from house arrest — announcing the “final phase of Operation Freedom” in partnership with Venezuela’s “main military units,” ahead of planned protests on May 1.

This, it turned out, would be the high point of the day for Guaidó’s pro-democracy movement.

Bedlam, not freedom, ensued. Maduro officials accused Guaidó and fringe elements of the military of staging a coup, as opponents and supporters of Maduro clashed violently in the streets.

Within hours, dozens of people returned to the site to threaten a “complete embargo” and “highest-level sanctions” on Cuba if “Cuban Troops and Militia do not immediately CEASE military and other operations” in Venezuela.

As Operation Freedom went sideways, U.S. officials began divulging details of an effort that had gone spectacularly wrong.

After months of hinting coyly that Maduro’s support within the military was more wobbly than it seemed, Bolton named three top Venezuelan officials — Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino; Supreme Court Chief Justice Maikel Moreno; and the commander of the presidential guard, Iván Rafael Hernández Dala — who he claimed had been engaged in lengthy talks with the Venezuelan opposition and had “all agreed that Maduro had to go,” only to renege this week (at least so far) on their commitments to facilitate a democratic political transition.

In a tweet addressed to the three men, Bolton suggested that the terms of the deal had been to help remove Maduro from power in exchange for amnesty from Guaidó and the lifting of U.S. sanctions against them. (Pompeo even implied that the Trump administration was involved in the negotiations, noting that “senior leaders” in Maduro’s government had “told us” they “were prepared to leave … over the past few weeks.”)

On Wednesday, in an interview with the radio host Hugh Hewitt, Bolton outlined how the plan was supposed to work. The senior officials and Guaidó would sign documents memorializing their agreement. The Venezuelan Supreme Court would declare Maduro’s Constituent Assembly illegitimate and thereby legitimize the Guaidó-led National Assembly. Military leaders like Padrino would then have the political and legal cover to take action against Maduro.

Yet “for reasons that are still not clear, that didn’t go forward yesterday,” Bolton admitted. (Another senior official, the head of Venezuela’s intelligence service, did in fact split with Maduro, according to U.S. officials.)

Speaking with reporters at the White House on Tuesday, Bolton offered one theory for why the plan never came to fruition: The Cuban government had prevailed on the three officials to stick with their boss. Fear of the tens of thousands of Cuban security forces in the country, he argued, is keeping military officials in check.

On television and Twitter on Tuesday, the defense minister repeatedly backed Maduro. But by ratting out Padrino and the other officials, and thus exposing them to Maduro’s retribution, U.S. officials seemed to be deliberately sowing dissension and mistrust in the upper echelons of the Maduro government — as a means of deepening its dysfunction and pressuring top officials to move against Maduro before he moved against them.

As the Republican Senator Marco Rubio, an wrote on Twitter on Wednesday, “high ranking #MaduroRegime officials must now deal with the realization that despite their tweets of support & appearance with #Maduro on TV last night he knows they plotted against him. If Maduro remains in power what do you think their future holds?” Just in case his point was too subtle, Rubio appended an image of a scene from The Godfather in which Michael Corleone lashes into his brother Fredo for betraying him, before ordering his assassination.

Guaidó, for his part, seems undaunted and told Hewitt, “I just don’t believe President Trump is prepared to see foreign governments effectively take over the control of Venezuela, which possesses the largest reserves of petroleum in the world.”

Posted in Policy, War | 2 Comments »

There was plenty for the Flips

Thursday, May 2nd, 2019

Dunlap’s company managed to settle down and hire some local help for a while:

The local population practically lived with us and the women made the rounds of the tents every morning and evening asking for clothes to wash. It was probably the only time these Filipino farm women ever had a chance to make a little money. The laundry was a big help to both soldiers and the “lavenderas.” They would wash everything from socks to blankets in the little brooks and creeks, beating the clothes on the stones with both their hands and wooden paddles. Somehow they were able to get them clean without wearing them out; I never did understand how. Drying the wet wash in the moist, rainy climate was a problem they solved by shaking the clothes in the air and then folding them and sleeping on them overnight. It worked. We had to supply the soap, otherwise they used their own rather rank coconut-oil types which left an unpleasant odor requiring two or three days airing and sunning to dispose of.

[...]

The Filipinos loved our food, especially the bread and meats we had, as their main diet had been rice, fruit and vegetables. We were completely fed up on corned beef and dehydrated stuff and did not even eat half our share of it so there was plenty for the Flips. For canned meat and clothes the people would trade eggs, chickens, bananas, even their cherished bolos.

Posted in Roy Dunlap, War | 1 Comment »

The source material deserves most of the blame

Wednesday, May 1st, 2019

Bryan Caplan argues that Game of Thrones has had awful pacing problems since they wrapped up Storm of Swords at the end of season 4:

But the source material deserves most of the blame. What should have happened:

1. Feast for Crows should have lived up to its name. In this book, a horrific winter descends on the North while Stark loyalists fight Baratheons fight Wildlings fight Boltons fight Greyjoys, leading to mass famine and swarms of refugees fleeing south. Meanwhile, Dany fights for control of Slaver’s Bay, and Cercei struggles for control with the religious fanatics. The book ends with Boltons attacking the Night’s Watch, allowing the Others to break through the Wall.

Major deaths: Stannis, Davos, Melisandre, Ramsey Bolton, Rickon, all the Night’s Watch except Jon and Sam, all the named Wildlings, Jorah, all of Dany’s slaver enemies.

2. In Dance with Dragons, the horrible winter continues south, along with swarms of refugees. The Night King takes over the North and besieges Moat Cailin. Cercei kills off her enemies in the Sept Massacre and sends Jaime to reinforce Moat Cailin with technical help from Sam Tarly. It looks like it’s going to work, but Dany (with Tyrion as her Hand) attacks King’s Landing with her dragons, leading to general collapse of the Lannister’s resistance. The book ends as the Others swarm Riverrun and take the Twins.

Major deaths: All of Cercei’s local enemies, Jaime, Cercei, Tommen, all the Tullies, all the Freys.

3. In Winds of Winter, Dany desperately tries to fight the Night King with her dragons and allies as the devastation of the North gets repeated everywhere North of Dorne. Littlefinger (who has long-since married Sansa and killed Robert Arryn) lures the Night King to the Eyrie after obtaining ancient lore to bind the Night King to his will. Meanwhile, all the remaining named characters rally to Dany, fortified by Sam’s technical help. One dragon gets turned undead; the Night King uses him to destroy the Eyrie, killing Littlefinger and Sansa. As the book ends, King’s Landing falls, and the survivors desperately retreat to Dorne.

Major deaths: Littlefinger, Sansa, Tyrion (who desperately tries to repeat his victory at Blackwater Bay), Sam, Varys.

4. In A Dream of Spring, the survivors fortify Dornish defenses. Winter abates, and much of the Night King’s army slowly rots into extinction. The Night King tries breaking the impasse with his undead dragon, but fails due to Arya’s spycraft. This opens the way for a multi-pronged counterattack. Half the remaining beloved characters die on five different fronts. In the end, they force the Night King back beyond the Wall, and prepare for the next Winter. This time, when a Stark says “Winter is coming,” all Westeros believes him!

Major deaths: Half the remaining beloved characters, but probably sparing Dany and Jon to give a little hope for the future.

Furthermore, each of these seasons should have been a full ten episodes. Cutting story-telling for special effects is a rotten trade-off. And never skimp on polishing the dialogue, which is the glory of the first four seasons!

One last thing: The Night King shouldn’t just talk; he should be a cool Satanic figure who bluntly points out the wickedness of Man and uses it to rationalize human extinction.

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